Moonlight on Masks
by Nezuko
Summary: All Uzuki Yuugao ever wanted to do was to be the best. As an ANBU rookie, she thinks she's finally made it... Until she realizes that the greatest challenge she's ever faced is her captain, Gekkou Hayate. Collaborative fic with Kilerkki
1. Behind the Mask

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on out livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 1: Behind the Mask**_

Part of being an ANBU unit commander was attending the trials for new recruits. It was interesting, actually, Hayate thought, despite the fact that he was essentially sitting around all day. He had a little sheaf of files on the candidates, and he studied the more interesting ones as they came up for review. They had already had a battery of tests to demonstrate their judgment, their leadership abilities, their creativity. Their fundamental knowledge as shinobi was certainly not in any question by this point in their careers.

What he was watching now was the individual sparring. Experienced ANBU were pitted against the candidates, under the watchful eyes of the squad commanders. Any who really stood out would pass next into the squad leaders' hands, and Hayate was carefully scanning for the ones he wanted to test against his katana. There was a tall, heavy-set young man--an Akimichi--who moved with the kind of terrifying speed the really skilled members of his clan had. His card got a flick from Hayate's pen.

And there was a woman. She had long, deep violet hair, which whipped around mesmerizingly as she leapt and tumbled with her sparring partner. She was clearly a taijutsu specialist, and damn good at it, too. Hayate couldn't help wondering if her hair was a liability in combat. So easily grabbed. But somehow, even with her opponent's best efforts, she seemed able to evade his grasp, and return every lunge with a sick-sounding thwack as her foot met the ANBU's armor.

She was good.

_Good looking, too,_ a little voice at the back of Hayate's head insisted. He dismissed it with a soft sniff, and pulled up her card. Uzuki Yuugao. She was one he'd like to test further. Definitely. The pen in his left hand left a sharp little tick in the box next to the words, "Advance to trial with Gekkou Hayate, Unit Six."

That was a match he was definitely looking forward to.

The match ended as Yuugao had known it would, from the first time her armored opponent didn't quite dodge her kick. He was strong, but his strength couldn't help him when he couldn't _catch_ her. Her speed and agility left him panting in her wake, and when the proctor finally called time, the ANBU groaned and reached for his ribs. Yuugao bit back her triumphant grin as she bowed to him and left the ring. And he'd swaggered so confidently when he first saw he'd be facing a woman...

Still, her clear victory here didn't mean _she_ could gather any confidence. She tried to remind herself of that, as she splashed her hot face at the fountain and caught her breath. If she'd done well enough here, she'd advance to face one of the squad commanders, and the best she could hope for there was a non-humiliating defeat. Her style was fast and flowing and flashy, but her stamina was less than average, and she was tired already.

She'd make it. She had to. Overconfidence wasn't an option, but neither was failure.

Yuugao took one last drink, tossed her hair back over her shoulder, and froze.

There was a man standing behind her. An ANBU veteran, in black and grey and blue-and-black-and-white mask framed by straight brown hair. No surprise, really--this was a public fountain in the training yards; people were free to drink from it as they choose--but she hadn't sensed him. Hadn't heard him, hadn't felt his chakra, hadn't known he was there at all.

And she'd thought she was good enough to join their ranks.

"Excuse me, ANBU-san," she said quietly. "Forgive me for the wait." She stepped aside, and hoped against hope that she hadn't just failed their most important test.

"Uzuki-san," Hayate said, and pushed his mask off his face to take a drink himself. He put it back in place before turning to face the woman. She was taller than he'd thought, now that he looked at her up close. Only five centimeters or so shorter than he was himself. The man she'd sparred against, Inoue, was tall, so she'd seemed slight in comparison.

"You did well against your opponent. Are you enjoying your day here with us?"

He wondered how she'd answer. To his eyes, she was indeed enjoying herself. Probably feeling pretty good about having bested a veteran ANBU. He was sure Inoue was feeling anything but good right now, getting his ribs taped and iced by one of the compound medics.

He had to be mocking her. Smirking behind the mask, perhaps; was there any other reason for him to have pulled it back on, when she'd already glimpsed his face as he drank? A thin face, almost delicate, with dark eyes and a straight nose and a gentle mouth. It was hard to imagine that mouth laughing at her behind his mask, though. Perhaps it was pity in his voice, not mockery.

"I fought too hard," she said, pushing her sweat-dampened hair back from her forehead again. A few tendrils had been caught in the spray of the water as she splashed her face, and they clung damply to her cheeks and neck. "I shouldn't have wasted so much energy on him." _You saw that, surely_, she wanted to add. If she'd been less tired, less thirsty, she'd have noticed his approach.

"You fought well," Hayate repeated, a little amused at her defensiveness. "Your opponent is a very skilled ANBU. If you hadn't fought hard against him you would be the one seeing the medic right now, not he."

He stepped back into an easy, relaxed posture, holding his files in his right hand, leaving the left free. He had to stifle an urge to reach out and brush that hair off her cheek. _What is it about this woman and her hair?_ he asked himself, and bit his lip. Good thing the mask hid his face from her, or she'd have seen how his eyes traced the way her hair spiraled down to spill over the curve of her shoulder. The way his glance couldn't help traveling a little further to the smallish, rounded breasts, picked out in delicate relief by the black fishnet shirt she wore under a high-collared white top.

A tiny breath of breeze fluttered between them, riffling the papers in his hand, and he pulled them closer to his armored chest. Maybe it was the hot, late-spring sun making Hayate feel so unaccountably unprofessional. He turned away from her and got another drink at the fountain, hoping the cold water would clear his head a little. He was evaluating this woman as a potential subordinate, after all.

She was still standing there when he turned back to her, masked again. "Well, Uzuki-san, I hope your next opponent proves equally satisfying."

"I...hope so as well," she murmured, eyes flicking down once more to the papers he still held against his chest. A proctor? That meant he probably knew exactly whom she would be facing in the next rounds. He could still be mocking her, of course...

But somehow a little of her first defensive edge had faded away. His praise, perhaps (and gods, it was almost frightening how good those few words were to hear), or his obvious attempt at small talk. Or even the way he'd pushed his mask up when he drank, as though he was no happier about wearing the mask in this late-spring heat than she was about the way her shirt clung sweatily to her chest. He looked younger than she'd first thought. No more than a few years older than her, perhaps. Much better, of course, since he was proctoring these rounds, but... Kind, despite that.

Perhaps she hadn't failed after all.

"Thank you," she said, a little more clearly, and ducked her head in a polite bow. "I hope you take as much satisfaction from observing it."

"I'm sure I will," Hayate answered her with a trace of humor in his voice. Then he vanished. Literally vanished. It was a jutsu, of course, but one only the fastest could manage, disappearing without even a telltale little swirl of leaves or mist to mark the going. And if Hayate was showing off just a little for this woman--well, who could blame him? She was pretty. Very pretty. Big, brown eyes that flashed with a liveliness rare in a kunoichi. Softly rounded cheeks. Pouting lips.

While Gekkou Hayate, ANBU squad commander, was interested in her for her prowess as a ninja, Gekkou Hayate, twenty-one-year-old young man, was definitely interested in her for much more carnal reasons.

Of course, he told himself, as he prepared to face her in his match with her, he needed to get those thoughts altogether out of his mind. She was a candidate. A pretty candidate, but a candidate. If he and the other commanders agreed, she would be a colleague in a mask and armor of her own. A subordinate. Probably not a direct one--no, that would be asking for trouble, to have a woman on your own squad whom you found attractive. But still, a subordinate. Someone he'd likely have to order into situations he doubted she'd return from.

Best not to think about her as anything but a soldier.

He stopped in the men's room to relieve himself, washed his face with a few handfuls of water from the sink, then glanced up at his reflection in the mirror. "Time to go, Gekkou," he told himself, and pulled the rabbit-faced mask over his own. Then he strode out, down the hall, and into the brilliant afternoon sun heating the arena. He reached up with his left hand to release the catch on his katana, then stood at easy attention, waiting for the woman.

She'd had a little time, after the ANBU left (with what she had to admit was an impressive jutsu; she rather liked that subtly dramatic flare), to stretch out and re-limber her muscles and try to ignore the growing nervousness in the pit of her stomach. The handful of congratulations she received from passing shinobi--other candidates and ANBU alike--didn't help much, either. By the time a proctor called her name, she was as tense and taut as steel wire. She could feel her pulse pounding in her throat. This was it, the last exam. She'd prove her worth here, or not at all.

But when she stepped into the ring again and recognized the mask that faced her, that 'not at all' almost began to sound like a viable option.

The proctors didn't waste any time on introductions. Almost before Yuugao's heart had picked up its skipped beat, the man at the edge of the ring had slapped his clipboard against his leg. "You have five minutes," he barked. "Begin!"

And then the adrenaline was back, and the pride, and the fierce determination to wipe away that hidden smile that had to be there, after all. He must have been laughing at her the whole time. Well, she'd lose this bout; that much was clear, from the hand on his katana and the easy confidence in his stance. He was a squad captain, after all, and she was--

She was Uzuki Yuugao, and she had all the world to prove.

She didn't shout. No jutsu name, no taijutsu yell, no scream of frustration and fury. Just the slap of a sandal against packed dirt, and the whistle of wind as her blinding kick sliced for the ANBU's masked head.

_Ah, she's fast,_ Hayate thought appreciatively and dodged under her kick, bringing his katana around in an elegant sweep towards the knee of the leg she'd balanced on. She was already evading though, adjusting her stance when her kick failed to connect, readying a second blow. Her shoe scuffed against Hayate's right shoulder as he propelled himself backwards, circling around her to dart in from the left with another blow aimed at knocking her off her feet. He stopped with the sword bare millimeters from her thigh.

"Point, Uzuki-san."

A flicker of motion and he was away again, readying his next attack.

Damn, his arm was definitely going to be bruised.

She was good.

Yuugao's lips thinned briefly as the ANBU retreated. She'd hit him, but not well enough; he was fast enough to dodge her first kick and take only bruising damage from her second, and that katana would have sliced through her leg if he hadn't pulled the blow. She couldn't count on his shoulder hindering him, either, not unless she managed to crush a nerve or crack his collarbone. He was better, faster, fresher; he'd seen her fight, and he knew her moves.

But not all of them.

She had the advantage in being bare-handed, and even a Sharingan-user would have been hard-pressed to match the speed of her seals. "_Raiton: Ko-shuurai no jutsu_," she murmured, as four blue-white balls of crackling energy gathered at the tips of her fingers. With a flick of her fingers they were gone, whirring angrily through the air after the nearest chakra source. After the ANBU.

Yuugao flashed through another few seals, and two Bunshin--and the real woman--followed them.

_Nice jutsu,_ Hayate thought, and quickly popped up a couple of bunshin of his own to attempt a diversion. The glowing, crackling balls of plasma, though, maintained their unerring course for him. _Chakra seekers!_ he realized, and flickered away with only centimeters to spare, using a repeat of the translocation jutsu Yuugao had seen at the fountain. He dispersed his bunshin, replacing them with a trio of kage bunshin, which by virtue of containing fragments of Hayate's chakra, became instant targets. It was a little like the Dance of the Crescent Moon, in that suddenly there were four Hayate's with silvery katana skimming through the air. He deflected one of the balls of lightning with his sword, while two of his bunshin took their hits, arcing backward in convulsions that looked like agony, then fragmenting into vapor with a clap.

There was one more lightning ball bearing down on him, and a trio of kunoichi soaring through the air with their violet hair flying behind them like satin ribbons. It was breathtaking.

He turned, ducked, then flipped in the air, crossing paths with his own clone and aiming a blow with the flat side of his blade for one of the women's necks. He hoped he'd targeted the right one. His clone intercepted one of hers, both exploding as the lightning hit its target. His katana arced down and through, slicing through illusion, and in that moment, with his back to the _real_ woman, he realized with a sick thrill, he was vulnerable.

He dealt with the _ko-shuurai_ and the bunshin equally easily, but that wasn't the point. That moment of distraction was enough for Yuugao to translocate behind him; she couldn't manage it nearly as neatly as he had, but with his attention focused on her bunshin, her best was enough.

And her best was a smashing kick aimed directly at his left shoulder. She pulled it a little, of course; she didn't intend to drive the broken ends of his collarbone down into his lungs. But when her heel connected with the shoulder-strap of his grey ANBU armor, it was hard enough for her to feel the shock up to her teeth.

She dropped to the ground behind him in a three-point crouch, panting, reaching for a handful of shuriken. But she didn't throw them quite yet. If he meant to go on, even with his left arm unusable--and she'd _felt_ that little crack beneath her heel--she'd take all the breathing space she could get.

He might tap out, of course. Another left-handed swordsman, unable now to use his left hand at all, probably would. But somehow, Yuugao didn't think this ANBU captain was just any swordsman.

The moment of impact played out in stunning clarity--a powerful, sharp shock that drove Hayate to his knees. The sound and sensation of his collarbone fracturing traveled up his spine and down his arm in reverberating waves. It was agony. His katana fell from his grasp, and he clutched at his left arm with his right with a gasping cry.

The proctor stepped in immediately, intending to end the match, but Hayate barked, "Back off, this match continues!" at him, and picked up the sword in his right hand. Eying the woman, crouched and defensive, he put the hilt of his katana between his teeth, raised his right hand in a seal and enveloped them in a thick, foul-smelling smog. While he was temporarily screened from her, he used his right hand to pull his left close to his body, tucking his hand under the shoulder strap next to the broken clavicle. He couldn't help the pained grunt the move forced out of him, but then hiding in the mist wasn't his long term plan in any event.

Returning the sword to his right hand, now that his left was at least secured from flapping around uselessly and damaging the shoulder further, Hayate honed in on the woman's presence. She had a chakra that felt like the brush of heated velvet against his skin, and she was right. Over. There.

He materialized behind her, swinging his sword in an arc that whistled over her head.

She'd dodged.

Damn, she was good.

Yuugao's resentment was draining away with her energy, though exhaustion replaced the one and admiration the other. Perhaps he'd been laughing at her, but by now she was fairly well convinced that he had a right to. Any man who could take that injury, bind up his arm, and keep going with only the slightest decrease in speed and power-- Well, she didn't think she'd regret this loss.

Not that she was quite prepared to accept it yet, of course. He was slower now, dulled by pain and the loss of his lead arm, and with his only usable hand taken up by his sword, he shouldn't be able to use jutsu. She slipped away from his strike, running through the foul-smelling shreds of the fading mist, and spun around again when she'd put a good five meters between them. Shuriken glinted as her hand whipped out, four bright little stars slicing through the air. No lightning balls, this time. Her already-depleted chakra was running dangerously low with her fatigue. She could make it to the five-minute limit, though.

Maybe.

Hayate weaved around the flying blades, feeling one slice a groove along his arm guard, another leave a stinging scratch across his cheek. They were just a distraction, one he paid little attention to as they clanged to the hard-packed earthen floor behind him. No, his target was Uzuki. She was starting to show fatigue--not surprising, given how hard she'd been worked at these trials. Hayate had every intention of using it against her.

He raced to close the distance between then, moving with nearly as much speed as he had at the start. He could see her eyes widen just a little as he rushed her, and he grinned behind his mask. The katana came down in a steep, straight cut, then flashed away just before it would have hit, and swept to the side. She was still trying to evade the blow that didn't land on her shoulder when the blade cut into her thigh.

It was a shallow cut, Hayate made sure of that. He didn't want to permanently disable her. Putting a stop to her flight, though, that was perfectly acceptable. She twisted towards him and he blinked away, translocating to her other side to hold the bloodied sword blade at her throat.

"My win, Uzuki-san," he said, panting hard and feeling satisfied.

Oh yes, he was definitely lobbying for this woman's inclusion in the ANBU elite.

"Time," the proctor called, breaking the frozen moment, and Hayate lowered his sword.

Yuugao didn't quite muffle a sharp gasp as she dodged _into_ the blade she'd thought she was dodging away from. The katana's razor edge slid into her thigh, slid out again, brushed her throat, and she was left standing there with muscles tense as taut wire and blood slowly seeping down her thigh. Her hands were trembling.

But his chest was heaving, too, and his voice was harsh with panting as he claimed his win. And his left hand was still tucked in under the narrow shoulder-strap of his vest, though evidently he hadn't needed it to beat her. Still--she hadn't acquitted herself badly.

She'd lost, as she'd known she would. But she'd fought her best, tired and drained as she was. He'd been holding back, of course--holding back more than she was, but that was to be expected; he was the captain, she only a candidate--but even so she'd hurt him. Even so, there was sweat sleeking his shoulders and dampening his hair, and his left shoulder, bared by the sleeveless shirt, was already beginning to bruise and swell.

Yuugao averted her eyes quickly, and looked up into the dark eye-holes of the mask.

"You were wrong," she said, quietly enough that only he could hear. "My next opponent wasn't _equally_ satisfying." And just for a moment, her bitten lips fleeted into a smile.

"No?" Hayate asked, and raised his hand to push his mask off his face, revealing a broad, friendly smile. "I'm so terribly sorry to have disappointed you, Uzuki-san." He wiped the inside of his gloved forearm across his sweaty brow, then carefully resheathed his katana with an awkward twist. It was clearly designed to be used left-handed. Getting it to go in from the right was a challenge that forced Hayate into a pained contortion.

He winced and a little grunt sounded in his throat, then he straightened and let gravity pull the sword down into its sheath.

"For my part, Uzuki-san, it was quite a treat. Although I'll admit I wish you hadn't had to break my shoulder." He reached up now to cradle his left elbow with his right arm, holding the injured arm even more securely in place.

"Will you accompany me to the medic to get your leg looked at?" he asked. "You should feel quite pleased. You are a very capable ninja."

"I didn't mean that," Yuugao began to protest, but bit it back; perhaps he knew what she'd meant after all. That friendly smile didn't look much like the smirk she'd imagined, and he had every right to tease back.

"I'm--sorry about that," she said instead, dark eyes flicking to his bruising collarbone just once before they returned to his face. He had very nice collarbones, even with the bruising. She hadn't noticed before.

As for her own injury...she glanced down for the first time, frowning at the neat edges of the long slice in the thigh of her dark violet capris. The blood was visible only as a faintly darker stain, but she could feel the warm liquid slipping down her skin, and the sharp pain as she shifted her weight. A flicker of that pain crossed her face, and a dusky blush of embarrassment followed it. _His_ injury might merit a wince, but hers certainly shouldn't have. "I'd be pleased if I hadn't gotten myself injured," she said, and tried to ignore the little glowing ball of pride his compliment had lit beneath her breastbone.

"Ah, you're a perfectionist, I see," Hayate said, still smiling. He blew out a breath of air, puffing the dark hair that flopped over his eyes away for a moment. "I do apologize for injuring you, although as they say, all's fair in love, war, and an ANBU spar."

He didn't want to give too much away. He didn't have final say, of course. But he'd seen her scores coming into the combat rounds. If she wasn't made for the mask and armor, no-one was.

"Well, Uzuki Yuugao-san, it has definitely been my pleasure meeting you," he continued, bowing slightly. He winced when the movement made his shoulder stab with pain, and straightened with a regretful smile. "Forgive my poor manners. I'm Gekkou Hayate, commander of Unit Six. If you can walk without assistance, come with me." Nodding his head in the direction of one of the doors at the edge of the arena, he added, "Just don't let the ANBU medics scare you off from the service. They're all a bunch of softies at the core."

"If the medics are that alarming," Yuugao said drily, "I'd just have to make sure I never get any wounds worthy of their attention." She took half a step, decided her leg could bear her weight after all, and looked up at him again. Gekkou Hayate. That name would be easy enough to remember. The Gekkou were kenjutsu specialists, weren't they? No wonder he was so good. She squashed the flicker of envy without much of a second thought; after over eight years as a shinobi, she'd fought and worked with enough proud scions of prouder clans that she no longer really envied their Bloodline Limits or family training or--family at all, come to that. Beyond her father's name and his worn dogtags, what she had, she'd won for herself.

She could walk without wincing, she found after the first step. It hurt, but the painful surprise had worn away; she was ready for each little stab of pain now, and she could keep her face smooth. The man walking beside her seemed to be faring a little worse. Yuugao felt that little ball of pride dissolve into guilt.

"I'm sorry about your shoulder," she repeated, looking up at him again. There seemed to be no safe place to focus her eyes; his fingers, curled under the shoulder-strap of his armor, only reminded her of what she'd done, and the veiled pain in his face did the same. "I should have pulled back more--as you did." Guilt again. He could have incapacitated her with that first strike. Why hadn't he?

"Ah, no, please," Hayate said, and gave her a small smile. "Then I wouldn't have been evaluating your true abilities. It's much better for you that you fought all out and gave me and the other commanders such a clear demonstration of your skills." He bit his lip as a slight misstep jostled his shoulder, noticed her sympathetic wince and tried to project bland reassurance into his voice.

"I certainly knew the risks when I stepped into the arena, after watching your earlier spars. And I'm sure you'll find we won't be the only people seeing the medics after this round. Although I may take some ribbing from the other captains."

He laughed softly and offered Yuugao another smile. "You really can cheer up, Uzuki-san. You did well, and the day is over."

She opened her mouth to protest that she didn't need to cheer up (did she really look that gloomy?) and then shut it again, thoughtfully. "Ribbing because you got injured by a rookie, or because it was a woman?"

She'd noticed, in the last few days of intensive testing, that though nearly thirty jounin and special jounin candidates had entered the exams with her, no more than five of those had been women. Unsurprising, really. Yuugao knew well enough the pressure that a kunoichi's family and friends--and even, occasionally, her superiors--placed on her to serve Konoha for a few years, retire, marry, and spend the rest of her life serving Konoha through her sons. ANBU certainly didn't figure into those plans for most clans' daughters. Even among those few women who'd chosen to dedicate their lives to kunai and jutsu, ANBU wasn't a popular choice. It was a man's world, her old genin sensei had told her. ANBU were the best of the best, but they were men.

Well, _she_ was a woman--or a kunoichi, at least--and she wasn't backing down. Not at the beginning of the exams, when she'd arrived early to find herself the only female in a check-in line of fifteen men. Not during the exams, when she'd fought men older and stronger and far more experienced than her. And certainly not now.

Hayate looked thoughtfully at her for a moment, before answering, "Both. But I don't care. You're good. That's what matters. Just because there aren't a lot of kunoichi in ANBU doesn't mean there aren't any, or that women aren't welcome."

He stopped at the door and waited a moment, before coloring slightly and looking at Yuugao. "Since we're discussing role reversal and a woman's place... Would you mind opening the door for me?" He gave a slight nod of his head towards his injured shoulder, accompanying it with a soft, pained sound. "I don't really want to let go of it with my good hand. Although I suppose pain is just pain. Not like it's going to _hurt_ me or anything."

He glanced at her leg, and the dark splotch now staining much of her right thigh. "I imagine that must hurt, too, after all."

The little glow of pride had lit again beneath her breastbone at his first words--a little ridiculously, she thought. Like a cigarette lighter or something, flaring at the briefest word of praise. At least she could cover her own faint blush in a hasty reach for the door. "Just pain," she said, as flippantly as she could manage. "I've had worse." Not recently; but then, she hadn't fought anyone as good as this Gekkou ANBU, recently. Even if this cut scarred, though, it still wouldn't match the long, puckered scar on the inside of her left thigh. _That_ one was her worst, and probably her worst memory as well.

She shook her head just the slightest bit, shoving that memory back into the darkness where it belonged, and stepped back to hold the door wide open. The air of the corridor beyond was cool, and she closed her eyes for a moment, leaning her forehead against the edge of the metal door and letting the soft breeze of the air conditioning dry the sweat that dampened her shirt and hair. Gods. If she stood here long enough, she could easily fall asleep.

When she failed to follow him through the door, Hayate stopped and looked back, alarmed to see her sagging against the heavy door. "Uzuki-san? Are you alright?" he asked, letting go of his injured arm to reach out to touch her shoulder. She was trembling, he realized. How hard had she worked out there, and how close to her limits had she come?

"Do you need to sit down? I'll summon a medic." He looked up the empty hall, wondering if it would be better to go get someone to help her, or stay with her and wait for a passerby.

Yuugao straightened instantly; sore muscles protested, and her leg screamed silently. His hand still on her shoulder seemed far more worthy of her attention, though. Gods, she hadn't thought he'd noticed; she'd worked so hard, and to think that a moment of weakness now could destroy it all--

"I'm fine," she said, too quickly. The lie had to be obvious, but she wasn't going to acknowledge it if she could help it. "Just a little worn-out. You needn't worry about me."

He'd let go of his arm to reach out to her, and his face was pale with the pain. Somehow, that made her feel even worse.

"Of course I'm worried about you," he said, letting go when she straightened up, although he didn't resume cradling his own arm. "What kind of a commander would I be if I worked a candidate to the point of exhaustion and then let them fall down somewhere alone? Are you sure you can make it to the infirmary with me? It's another several hundred meters down this way." Hayate used his eyes to indicate the direction, keeping his upper body as still as he could, despite his hand still loose to grab her should she sway or start to fall.

"Perhaps you need something to drink. It's unseasonably hot today, and we've been working out quite hard."

Actually, something to drink was appealing to him too, he thought, feeling a trickle of sweat slide down his temple. Something to drink and a couple of those little yellow pills the medics would have. He hoped they'd be able to set his shoulder easily. And this would probably mean a week off from missions. Of course, with the candidate trials and Rookie orientation to do, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. _Someone_ had to stay in ANBU HQ and do the paperwork. Usually it was whoever was both high-ranking enough to handle it and injured enough to be grounded.

He held his right arm out to her a little stiffly. "Take my arm, Uzuki-san? I'd prefer you not faint and strike your head."

"I'm not going to faint!" Yuugao said, outraged. "_You're_ the one with a broken collar-bone. I'm just--"

Exhausted, nearly chakra-drained, still losing blood, and far too proud to admit it. If she couldn't manage this, how was she expected to run ANBU missions?

"Besides," she said, more reasonably, "you need to support your shoulder. You need a sling, really." Which the empty corridor certainly wasn't going to provide. It didn't look like either of them had any spare fabric on them, although...

She fingered the high, mandarin collar of her white shirt irresolutely. She _did_ have the fishnet beneath it, and breast-bindings, and it wasn't like many kunoichi didn't run around wearing much less. (Anko, for example. She never bothered with the breast-bindings.) Whether he would accept it was another issue altogether, though.

Hayate almost choked when he realized what she must be thinking. "No, I'm fine, I can just hold it for the few meters between me and the infirmary, really." Good gods, would she really consider taking her shirt off to make a sling for a three-hundred-meter walk? He tried not to think of how enticing she would look, stripped of the high-collared blouse, wearing only the fishnet and whatever undergarments she might have underneath.

_Get a hold of yourself, Gekkou,_ he told himself sternly. _Your candidate here is bleeding and shaking, and you're injured too, and you're fantasizing about her? Gods it must be sunstroke. Please, let it be sunstroke._ It was either that, or the rumor that lack of female companionship could addle a man's brain if unremedied over time was true.

He bit hard on the inside of his lip and forced his eyes to meet hers, and stray away from her long, sensuous violet hair... Such nice hair... Another nip at his lip, which surely must be bleeding by now.

"Uzuki-san. I think it would be best if we continued to the infirmary, if you think you can manage."

Math was truly an amazing thing, condensing "several hundred" meters into just a "few." That, and the slightly strangled look on his face...

Perhaps the last few days of constant strain had something to do with it, or her exhaustion, or even her bloodloss (though the light-headedness was nothing more than she could manage). Whatever it was, her beginning smile cracked into a full laugh. She dropped her hand from her collar and pressed it casually against her leg, where hopefully he wouldn't notice the blood slowly welling between her fingers.

"I can manage, I think," she said. "I'm sorry for startling you, Gekkou-san." But oh gods, the look on his face...

Of course, it was entirely possible that he wasn't inclined her way at all; she'd heard that was fairly common, in the almost exclusively-male ANBU. It was still funny, though.

She was laughing. Was that a pain reaction? Or no--she was laughing at him, wasn't she? At his awkwardness. Right, well, way to impress a chick, right? Hayate really wondered what the hell he thought he was doing.

Of course he noticed her leg. Not just because she had her hand on it, either. He'd inflicted the wound, after all, and she seemed to be more seriously injured than he'd intended. "Uzuki-san. Your leg..." Hayate said, and reached into a pocket to extract a handkerchief. He held it out to her, and gritted his teeth. His shoulder was throbbing now, with every beat of his pulse, and he could feel the swelling starting to push at his vest. He desperately wanted to take his hand down, but that would mean he'd have to hold his left arm in his right, and he still wasn't convinced he wasn't going to need to catch Yuugao on her way to the floor.

"I really must insist you come with me to the medics now, Uzuki-san."

Since when had men begun carrying handkerchiefs?

Since he did, apparently; somehow it didn't surprise her that Hayate was the sort of man to produce a handkerchief whenever it was needed. It surprised her a little more that she'd so easily begun thinking of him as _Hayate_, rather than _Gekkou-san_ or even _that ANBU commander_, but... Well, as long as she didn't say it aloud, there shouldn't be a problem.

"Thank you," she said gratefully, accepting the handkerchief and refolding it neatly before pressing the pad against her leg. She should have brought bandages with her. Stupid, really, but with an infirmary on-site, she hadn't thought she'd need them, and she hadn't wanted anything that could weigh her down...

Handkerchief in place, she forced herself to begin walking again at last. It wasn't so bad, now, with the blood seeping into the makeshift bandage rather than trickling down her leg; the pain was easy enough to ignore as long as she had something else to concentrate on. She chose the clean lines of Hayate's profile, set with pain and still, a little, with worry.

"May I ask--how long have you served in ANBU?"

"Two years," Hayate answered, leading her slowly through the corridors. Between her limp and his cautious attempts to minimize the jar of his footfalls, they were moving at a snail's pace. But moving was better than not. "I've been a commander for the last six months." It felt like longer. A _lot_ longer. How had only six months passed since he agreed to take on the responsibilities of leading a team?

"What about you, Uzuki-san? I know you were asked the question in your application, but I don't recall your answer at the moment. Why ANBU? You seemed to notice already that there are few women here."

Just a few hallways more, he thought, and he'd have succeeded in this mission of delivering the two of them conscious and reparable to the medic's hands.

"That's one of the reasons, actually," she admitted. This _hadn't_ gone on her application--but what was the harm? If she were going to screw things up, she'd already have done it far more effectively than a few words could manage. "They probably need more women. And I...had something to prove. ANBU seemed the best place to do it."

Her father had never served in the ANBU, but perhaps he might have, if he'd lived. Perhaps he would have given his permission for his daughter to join. Her mother would probably have rather died than see Yuugao with the spiral inked on her shoulder--but then, she already had. And that was just one more reason.

"Besides," she added, tossing her head to shake her hair off her forehead again, "if any young man who's good enough can join, why shouldn't any young woman?"

Hayate nodded. A tiny nod, because by now even that motion was hurting. "My mother would have liked you," he said, and stopped in front of a door marked with that universal symbol of infirmaries everywhere: a blood-red cross. He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead and starting to run down his face again. "She never made it beyond chuunin, but she was always one for that 'women can be anything men can be' way of thinking."

He swallowed dryly and looked at Yuugao, then at the door. She stepped forward to open this one without hesitating, and he gave her a pale smile.

Then he led her into what was, for all intents and purposes, a mini-hospital.

There was an older woman in a medic's uniform heading over to them almost immediately, making sounds of vague disapproval, looking between Hayate with his obviously broken collarbone and Yuugao with her bleeding leg.

"I take it you and your protégé here suffered a similar fate to Yamanaka-taichou and his candidate?" the woman clucked and reached for Yuugao, breezing past Hayate. "I know him, dear. What's your name and what's your injury? Is it just your leg?" She stopped to give Hayate a frown, then called over to one of her subordinates, "Get some ice on Gekkou-taichou's shoulder. He's obviously broken it."

Hayate was pretty sure he heard her mutter, "The damn fool" under her breath.

"_He_ didn't break it," Yuugao protested, a little more sharply than perhaps she should have; the medic gave her a startled look. Yuugao took a deep breath. "I'm Uzuki Yuugao, Jounin, 012161. I broke Gekkou-taichou's collarbone, and he needs medical attention more than I do. The bleeding's mostly stopping."

Which wasn't _quite_ true, but the blood flow did seem to be tapering off quite a bit with the application of pressure and Hayate's makeshift bandage.

"No I don't!" Hayate protested. "I mean yes, it's broken, but I'm concerned about Uzuki-san. I can wait with this. It's just..."

"Gekkou-taichou," the woman interrupted and glared up at him. She was probably in her fifties, and had been a shinobi medic longer than either Hayate or Yuugao had been alive. "You will go with Oda-sensei, who will be the one making the determination about your shoulder. Not you. You, dear boy, are obviously in pain and in no frame of mind to be making medical judgments best left to the actual medics."

Hayate started to protest, but another medic, this time a tall man with burly arms who looked like he spent more than a few hours working out in ANBU's gym or wrestling with uncooperative patients, stepped over and beckoned. "Please, come with me, Gekkou-taichou." He was unfailingly polite. He was also, clearly, not a man to be lightly disobeyed.

"Uzuki-san, please remember what I said about the medics," Hayate called as he was led behind a swinging curtain. "I'll look for you as soon as I am free."

_They're all a bunch of softies at the core,_ he'd said, and she had to smile as she remembered it. She let the woman take her arm, but she held off the inevitable hustling-behind-another-curtain for just a moment. Just long enough to call after him: "Thank you, Gekkou-taichou."

And then she was gone, skinning out of her bloody trousers and hoisting herself onto a paper-covered table and wincing as the medic prodded her wound, and trying firmly to think of something other than the necessary stitches the medic was murmuring to herself about.

ANBU was good. Plans were good. Hayate had as much as said that she would make it in; hopefully her performance in the corridors hadn't damaged his confidence in that. If it hadn't...

Well, she didn't think she'd have any choice in the matter. But all the same, until she got her final team assignments, she could let herself hope.

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter One_


	2. Making the Cut

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on out livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 2: Making the Cut**_

By the time Hayate was finally let loose from the medics' care, with his arm bound by a bandage and sling, and strict instructions to stay off missions for a month--_a month!_--he was famished. Yuugao was long gone, escorted out of the ANBU buildings with a crutch, and a row of stitches and a clean white bandage decorating her thigh. He supposed he shouldn't have told her he'd look for her. He had a meeting to go to now. A captains' meeting was waiting for him, and hopefully some dinner, where they would be culling through the candidates who'd made it all the way to the end of the trials.

He was definitely recommending Uzuki, he thought, as he headed down the dimly lit corridor on the way to the briefing rooms. He saw Yamanaka Hiroshi, Squad Eight's captain, limping along on crutches ahead of him.

"Hiroshi, wait up," he called and caught up to the taller man. "You're going to the meeting, too, right? Are they gonna feed us? I'm starved."

Hiroshi glanced round, brows rising and gloomy frown lifting as he saw the other captain's sling-bound arm. His day was suddenly looking a little brighter. "Tsuchiya mentioned sending one of his boys out for dinner," he said, and then didn't restrain his curiosity any longer. "What happened to _you_? You had the Uzuki girl, right? Gods, Hayate, you must be slipping if you could get your ass handed to you by a chick like that..."

Ah, Hayate thought, it was starting already. Well he'd known it would. At least he could honestly say he'd taken the hit cleanly. He'd been fighting hard, she was just that good.

"Screw you," he said without malice. "She was good. And it's not like _you_ did any better than I did. Least I still have both my eyebrows." He eyed his comrade's singed face with a mixture of amusement and concern. "Don't you know how to dodge a _katon_ yet? And what'd you do to your leg?"

"Sprained knee," Hiroshi grunted, scowling down at his splinted leg. He resisted the urge to reach for his poor, abused eyebrows; the medics had slathered his face with burn cream and told him sternly not to touch it until he reapplied the ointment that night. Not like he could do anything now anyway, with both his hands occupied with his crutches.

Ah, well, at least he'd come out of it better than his candidate had. Hiroshi's kid had only managed to knock his mask off and then singe him with a _katon_; he'd sprained the knee himself, twisting too fast as he evaded yet another _katon_. But the boy was lying in the infirmary now, out cold with a bad concussion, a broken wrist, and a torn hamstring. He wondered how Hayate's girl had fared.

"If she was that good, she's gotta be running around Konoha now telling everyone how she smacked down an ANBU captain." He attempted a cheerful leer at Hayate, and turned it into a wince. "Don't tell me she got off without even a bruise."

"I ended up slicing her leg up a little, " Hayate admitted. "And she was about to drop from exhaustion when we finished. I felt a little bad about that. Left her in the infirmary, but she was gone when I got out." He hoped she was alright. The medic who'd treated her had told him she'd be fine with a little rest and a decent meal or two. She'd told Hayate the same thing about himself, too.

"You off missions? I am. Oda-sensei was a bastard about my arm, too. Guy's a total sadist," he said and grinned at his companion. "And I hear your candidate is a complete mess. You've got no finesse at all, have you?"

"You must've been going easy on her," Hiroshi scoffed, completely ignoring his previous claim that Hayate hadn't even been able to stand up to her. "What, got the hots for her? About time you found yourself someone to roll--we were starting to wonder if you'd taken vows of celibacy or something."

That hit a little close to home. Hayate blinked, and covered his reaction by pushing the door to the briefing room open. The other captains were ranged around a long oval table, eating pizza. Pizza was good. Hayate's stomach rumbled loudly at the scent, and he leaned against the door, holding it for Hiroshi.

"Go ahead, gimps first," he said with a smirk.

"And of course I was holding back. I actually want my candidate to join the service, not spend the next three weeks in the hospital."

Ribbing Hayate was no fun at _all_. The man was only a year younger than Hiroshi, but he seemed almost as calm as an old sage at times. Perhaps he really was taking vows of celibacy. Hiroshi sulked to his chair, cajoled Squad Seven's captain into pulling it out for him, and was reaching for pizza almost before Hayate made it to the table.

"Gekkou's going soft," he announced to the room at large through a mouthful of melted cheese. "He thinks the point of this rigamarole is to actually _recruit._"

At the head of the table, Tsuchiya Ryuuhei snorted and set his own slice of pizza down, wiping his hands on a paper napkin and reaching for a stack of file folders. He passed one down the table to Hiroshi, and sent another skimming across the table to Hayate's place. "Whatever could've given you that idea?"

Like most of the other captains sitting around the table, Squad One's commander--and the overall division commander of ANBU--was a young man, barely out of his twenties. Ryuuhei nodded a greeting to Hayate and reached for his pizza again. "You gave a good show out there, Hayate. I heard some of the candidates clapping at the end."

Hayate used his elbow to snag the papers before they went hurtling over the edge of the table, winced a little, and reached for a piece of pizza. One of the pieces loaded with meat and veggies and little unidentifiable green squiggles that were probably some kind of seasoning. He hoped.

"My candidate was a strong fighter," he said and grinned a little at the compliment. Ryuuhei didn't hand them out lightly.

He looked around the room, noting they were nearly all present, and took a huge mouthful of pizza, eating with the abandon of a starving man. As long as there were one or two captains still absent, he had time to eat.

"Where's Ibiki?" he asked Genta, the commander of Squad Three, flicking through his papers.

"Still evaluating, I think," the other man replied. "The interrogation evals always take longer than the combat. We can just kick asses and tell who's good and who isn't, they have to do all that psychology bullshit."

Hayate nodded and spread the papers out on the table in front of him. There were sixteen candidates who had made it as far as sparring with the captains, including Yuugao. There was even another woman, though he could see at a glance that she'd already been cut. The marks from the other captains on her performance were fair at best, in that final round, his own included.

He pulled Yuugao's sheet out and read it over, pleased to see that the captains who'd evaluated their spar had given her high marks. Good, it wasn't just him and parts of his anatomy not used for combat liking that woman.

"That's your purple-haired chick, huh?" Genta said, pointing at the profile. "She was pretty good. Although you could have taken her leg off if you'd been a little less careful."

"You saw that?" Hayate asked. "But I was careful." He grinned. "Unlike Yamanaka. I'm assuming his guy is off the table?"

Hiroshi growled inarticulately around his pizza, and refused to answer. Beside him, Satoru of Squad Nine laughed. "Latest reports have the kid still out cold in the infirmary. Medics say they're gonna wait and let him wake up on his own." He rubbed his neck self-consciously. "I got a guy in there, too. Broken arm. But he walked out on his own."

"Bet Gekkou would've liked to help his chick out," Hiroshi said snidely, his mouth clear at last. He shuffled through his own papers, leaving greasy fingerprints behind, until he found Yuugao's profile. "Hah!" he said triumphantly, stabbing a finger at the ID picture. The girl's face was serious, set; she looked as if she'd stayed up late memorizing all the Shinobi Rules and was trying to embody each one of them as she posed for her official photograph. Hiroshi's face fell again (painfully). The girl's features were pretty enough, but she looked so stony that it might be easier coaxing a Jizo statue to put it out. Well, everyone knew Hayate hadn't had any action in a long time; maybe he thought this was the best he could get...

Probably Hayate really _was_ in training to be a monk. But Hiroshi liked his theory better.

Hayate was saved from having to answer that by the door opening once again. A tall man with a forbiddingly scarred face and a long black leather coat entered and looked around the room.

"Oi, it's the drama queen from T&I," Genta whispered to Hayate. "Guess we have to start the meeting."

Ibiki just grinned at Squad Three's commander. "I'm sure you'd know _all_ about drama _queens_, Sakamoto," he said, and helped himself to a piece of pizza.

The other captains chuckled, including Genta, who took the ribbing good naturedly. After all, he was actually getting some action, unlike tall dark and scary, right? Who cared with whom?

Hayate laughed quietly, and reached for another piece of pizza himself. "Well, what's the protocol? This is the first time I've done one of these recruiting drives," he said, and looked expectantly at Ryuuhei.

Ryuuhei passed another folder down the table to Ibiki, and shrugged. "Not much protocol at all. We've got the marks everyone gave on all the candidates; some of 'em bear some discussion, and some of 'em are pretty clear. At least five of us observed every candidate, so we've got a pretty broad spectrum of opinions." He glanced to his left, where Tenzou of Squad Two was quietly eating his pizza and flipping through the profiles. "You had the first candidate, Tenzou--Tanaka Hiromi," he added to the others, and they scrambled through their folders to find the appropriate file.

Tenzou set his pizza down and cleared his throat. He only ended up coughing. Genta shoved a glass of water towards him, and he took it gratefully. "Sorry about that. Um, Tanaka. Well, his genjutsu's solid, but his taijutsu could use some work..."

Over the course of the next hour they talked their way through each file, sometimes passing or rejecting a candidate with only a few comments, sometimes arguing fiercely for ten minutes at a time. The pizza boxes disappeared from the table; someone produced a box of dango and passed it around. Ryuuhei took three.

Hiroshi discussed his candidate briefly (decent ninjutsu, sucky taijutsu, strength but no speed; recommended rejection) and then it was Hayate's turn.

"Uzuki Yuugao," Hayate said, and picked up her file. "Well you can see she has some impressive taijutsu and speed." He made a wry face and glanced down at his arm in its sling. "Her ninjutsu was quite skillful, too."

"That's not all you were impressed by," Hiroshi teased. Hayate just gave him a look.

"She performed extremely well on all her tests and trials," he continued. "I recommend we give her a Hunter position."

"What about her genjutsu?" Tenzou asked. "Is it solid enough?"

"I"d say so," Hayate answered. "As long as we balance the squad she's assigned to to make sure there's a specialist genjutsu user in her unit, I think she'd make an excellent ANBU. She's got every qualification we've said we were looking for."

"Except she's a woman," Ibiki put in. "We have few women Hunters. Women tend to come to my department. Are you prepared for a female in your ranks, gentlemen?"

"I don't see how that matters," Hayate protested. "She's a good ninja. One of the best at these trials."

"She'll be living and working on a team with three other men," Ryuuhei pointed out. "Her captain and comrades will have to make some considerations for that." His dark eyes glanced thoughtfully down the table. "How would you feel about having her in your squad?"

Tenzou shrugged. Genta grinned. "I'm probably the only one who wouldn't worry. But I can see my squad getting a little fussy over it."

"It'd be awkward," Tanabe Satoru of Squad Nine confessed. "I mean, my girlfriend's bad enough--can you imagine having a kunoichi on your team that week of the month?"

Several of the men shuddered. Satoru added wryly, "I take missions that week just to get _away_."

"There hasn't been a woman Hunter in ANBU as long as I've been in," Hiroshi finished, with all the worldly wisdom that three years' experience could give him. "S'better that way. Being a Hunter is a man's job." It was an opinion not altogether unique in the rarified confines of the ANBU.

Ibiki looked sharply at him, but he didn't speak.

"There have been females on ANBU units since Konoha's founding," Ryuuhei remarked mildly. "I am asking about this set of commanders and the current squads. I take it that's a no from you then, Hiroshi and Satoru?"

Both men shook their heads.

"Any others? Hayate?"

"I'm fine with it," Hayate answered, and didn't give it much more thought.

"Then we agree, Uzuki Yuugao is in as long as we place her on a squad where she will fit in," Ryuuhei said with finality, and turned the copy of her profile over. "Next candidate, Akimichi Touji..."

ooo

It wasn't until two days later, when Hayate was reading through the list of assignments of the newest Rookies, that he realized what he'd agreed to. There in black and white, with Ryuuhei's and the Hokage's seals affixed at the bottom, were the orders for the new Squad Six:  
_Captain, 011671 Gekkou Hayate  
Hunter, 010243 Tousaki Ryouma  
Hunter, 012161 Uzuki Yuugao  
Hunter and Medic, 012104 Yamane Shou_

And his orders:  
_Gekkou Hayate on medical restriction until 06-17, to conduct new Hunter orientation starting 06-03._

Ryuuhei had put the woman on his squad. Well, he'd wanted her in ANBU, and he'd wanted to see her again. Just... not quite like that.

He rolled the assignment scroll back up and carefully placed it in his pouch, still mindful of his arm in its sling, and went to look for Ryouma and Shou, to tell them the good news.

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Two_


	3. Girl Talk

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on out livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 3: Girl Talk**_

The young masked ANBU who'd escorted Yuugao out of the compound had mentioned--a little sympathetically, she thought--that she probably wouldn't hear back from HQ for at least two or three days. "And _I_ got rejected, my first time," he'd confided. "But there's another exam in six months, y'know."

"Mmm," Yuugao had said, and decided not to comment any further. Hayate had seemed encouraging; but things could change. She could wait. Two or three days wasn't that long.

It was, though. Without knowing if or how soon she'd be summoned, she couldn't take any missions. Twelve hours' sleep restored most of her chakra and energy, but she still felt curiously tired; the strain of the past few days of examinations seemed reluctant to drain away, and her leg hurt. Cleaning her apartment should have taken half a morning; it took most of the first day, instead, and left her exhausted. She overslept again, and could not remember her dreams when she woke.

At least by that morning she seemed to have recovered fully from her exhaustion and chakra depletion; but it was a mixed blessing. The time crept by, and she found herself unable to focus even on the calligraphy that usually absorbed her entirely. By early afternoon, she felt she'd have to get out or go mad.

The medic had forbidden her from training for at least a week, until the stitches came out, but she could at least walk without the crutch. Wandering aimlessly--and staying as far away from both the ANBU HQ or the training grounds as she could manage--she found herself in the open market. At least tomatoes were more interesting than her apartment's familiar walls.

Kamizuki Izumo was studying a display of invitingly unusual fruits. Dragon fruits, they were called, and they looked it, well protected behind a scaly greenish exterior with faint hints of dusky pink at the base of each petal-like scale. They had a price tag on them, though, that would pretty much wipe out his entire shopping budget for the week if he bought more than one. And it was unthinkable that he would get only one, if he decided to get them. Kotetsu would have to have some, and there needed to be a couple to experiment with cooking, as well as the ones to eat fresh. If you ate them fresh. Or cooked them. He wasn't sure.

The greengrocer was a savvy woman, who knew her customers well. "Nice, aren't they, Kamizuki-san?" she asked, and picked one up, slicing it in half with a deft twist of a fruit knife she'd procured from the depths of her apron.

Inside, the fruit was the most vibrantly unnatural-looking magenta Izumo had ever seen. It glistened wetly in the sun, studded with little black spheres and looking like a vamp's lips. The fruit vendor cut a wedge off and handed it to Izumo with a grin. "Go ahead, try it. You can eat the seeds."

He held the fruit to his nose, sniffing at the exotic, otherworldly perfume that exuded from it, then took a cautious bite, then another. Oh hell yesss, he needed some of these. _Needed_ them. Kotetsu didn't have to know how much they cost, right?

He dug into his pocket to estimate just how many ryou he could spare and still afford rice, and was glancing distractedly away when he caught sight of an old friend.

"Yuugao! Come over here and try these! You have to see these things!"

Yuugao glanced up from her perusal of the mounds of scarlet tomatoes, blinked against the bright afternoon sun, and then blinked again. That was Izumo, of course, but what on earth was he holding? (And where was Kotetsu?)

She drifted closer, curious, but wrinkled her nose and stepped back again when Izumo waved the half-eaten wedge of fruit at her. "I don't eat things that look like they might bite back. What is it?"

"It's a dragon fruit," Izumo said with a grin, as if he'd been eating the strange looking things since he was old enough to eat solids. "Isn't it gorgeous? Mmm and smell! It's got an awesome perfume. I'm gonna put some of fruit salad and maynbe make some tarts and..." He looked up at the greengrocer, who was smiling happily, no doubt at the thought of the heavy coins she would soon be receiving for her wondrous fruits from the odd little shaggy-haired shinobi.

"So - can you do these with chicken? What can you do with 'em besides eat 'em?"

"Can't really say, Kamizuki-san," the woman replied with an apologetic little bow. "I got them from a tradesman from Tea Country, but I really don't know much about them except that they're gorgeous inside and taste like a dream."

"Ah well..." Izumo's face fell a little, then brightened again. "I'll just have to experiment." He grinned at Yuugao and held out the fruit once more. "Come on, just a little bite? Heard you were starting to take some chances and live a little." He looked around to make sure they weren't overheard and leaned in. "Did you really just get recruited for ANBU?"

"Sssh," Yuugao said automatically, glancing up at the greengrocer. The woman, plump face suddenly bland, busied herself sorting her fruit. She'd lived long enough in a shinobi town to know when to close her ears, apparently, but all the same Yuugao dropped her voice to a low hiss. "Where did you hear about that?" she demanded. _She_ certainly hadn't told anyone that she'd been trying out; she'd planned to wait until after she received confirmation of her acceptance or rejection.

If it was the latter, she wouldn't have mentioned it at all.

Except apparently Izumo had spoiled it all, just as _she'd_ spoiled his pranks with Kotetsu back in their Academy days. Not with the same motivations, of course; the time they'd planned to replace Uchiha Itachi's shuriken set with live, henge'd frogs had _not_ been safe.

"You think me and Ko got that job working mission assignments for the glamour of handing out D-ranks to genin teams?" Izumo laughed and popped the rest of the dragon fruit piece into his mouth. "Got a list of who's off missions til when. You were off on 'Administrative' for the exact number of days the trials were going on. And we knew it was the trials, 'cause we had to practically freakin' shut down ANBU while the captains conferred." He grinned at Yuugao and gave her a rakish wink.

Yeah, just _try_ keeping a secret from the administrative staff in a village of ninja.

"And before you go getting your nose out of joint about it, no we haven't said a word to anyone but you." He looked at her bandaged leg then and raised an eyebrow. "But it looks like you've probably got some more you could tell _us._ Why don't you come to dinner tonight? Ko's got night-shift guard duty, so we're eating a little early, but you could stay and keep me company s'late as you want."

"I was waiting until I heard back," Yuugao said, but a little of the tightness had eased out of her voice. Of course, Izumo and Kotetsu had always had a talent for sniffing out information they weren't supposed to know, but she was relieved to hear they'd figured this out...semi-legally. It wasn't like her participation in the exams was exactly classified, anyway, nor even her (hoped-for) entrance into ANBU--she'd have been hard-pressed to keep _that_ secret from her best friends.

She picked up another of the bizarre fruit from the mound in front of them, eyed it dubiously, and glanced back at Izumo with a small smile. "I'd like that, Izumo-kun. If I buy you these in return for dinner, though, you've got to promise you're not going to try to make me eat them."

Izumo's mouth dropped open. Had she even _looked_ at the prices chalked on the little board above the dragon fruit? "You, uh, serious about that, Yuugao?" He glanced at the prices himself, then back at his friend. "I mean, I'm sure as hell not saying no, cause Kotetsu'll skin me alive if I spend all our grocery money on these, but..."

He was sure she could read the desire for those odd little fruits in his eyes. He was also pretty sure, having known her as long as he had, that she would indulge him.

"You pick up the dragon fruit, and I'll make you anything you want for dinner. Anything at all. I was gonna do fish, but hell, you name it, and I'll cook it."

Coming from Izumo, that was quite the pledge. He must _really_ want this fruit. Yuugao's smile widened a little further, and she turned to the greengrocer. "Three of the best, please," she told the woman, who abruptly switched from pretend deafness into smiling business mode.

"Anything else?" the greengrocer inquired, sorting through the mound of prickly fruit to find three that looked absolutely the same as the others, to Yuugao's eyes. Possibly there was a difference in how they felt, or possibly she was just putting on a show while picking at random. Well, Yuugao had no intention of eating the fruit; she wouldn't protest. She shook her head, and the grocer busied herself wrapping the dragon fruit up in a white paper bag and ringing up the purchase. The amount she named seemed obscenely high for three pieces of fruit, but Yuugao fished out her wallet without complaint. It would about pay for dinner at one of Konoha's nicer restaurants, but it still fell short of paying for the kind of dinner Izumo could produce when he _really_ exerted himself.

"Two for you and one for Kotetsu-kun," she told him, passing the white bag to him as they headed away from the fruit stall. "If you can get him to eat it."

As for her own request--that was harder. Izumo might like experimenting with his food, and Kotetsu might put up with it, but Yuugao preferred to stay as safe as she could. Fish was tolerable, shellfish to be avoided if at all possible; anything involving fungi might as well have involved poison. Eggplant was worst of all. But Izumo knew that, and generally (unless Kotetsu had urged him into a pranking mood again) appealed to her tastes. "Katsudon?" she asked at last. "And dessert. That chocolate thing you made for my birthday last year?"

Izumo took the bag of fruit with a pleased grin, holding it close and peering in at the fruit one more time, before closing it up and stowing it carefully in his string shopping bag.

"Ooooh, hmmmm," he said, pretending to be forgetful. "Did I make you something with chocolate? I thought I did that fruit salad thing with the coconut and cream..."

Of course he knew exactly what she was talking about. Warm chocolate cake with a nearly liquid core, served steaming hot from the oven with a scoop of cold ice cream. Kotetsu'd called it a chocolate orgasm, and neither Izumo nor Yuugao (nor anyone else who'd tasted that particular invention of Izumo's) could disagree.

He stopped at the butcher's next, examining the pork to find cutlets worthy of bribing the story about the ANBU trials out of feeding his friend.

He really was going to make her say it, wasn't he? That was gratitude for you. Yuugao tried unsuccessfully to mask her rising blush with a glare. "The fruit thing was _your_ birthday," she said, "since you said you weren't going to let Kotetsu or me spoil it with bad food. The chocolate cake was definitely mine."

Growing up with Izumo and Kotetsu as her best friends in the Academy and after; serving as a shinobi; meeting and befriending Mitarashi Anko in the kunoichi corps; it all _should_ have inured her to the delicate blush that now tinted her cheekbones. She certainly had no real problem with body-shyness. But changing or washing in front of your teammates on a mission was totally different from discussing sex with them--or applying sexual terms to food. She'd had to agree with Kotetsu's label for the new cake, but that didn't mean she hadn't blushed furiously when he'd said it (or that Izumo and Kotetsu hadn't teased her about it for _weeks_.)

"Oh, that's right," Izumo said with a grin, _"you_ were the one who got the big chocolate O. Well Ko got some too, but that's only cause he begged me to make him one for Christmas." And just about every other holiday he could think of. He was already agitating for Izumo to make it for his birthday in the coming July, even though it was still almost two months away. Izumo pointed to the pork he'd decided on and had the butcher wrap it up for him.

"Well, I suppose it could be arranged," he said, turning back to Yuugao. "We'll need to get some dark chocolate, and a dozen eggs and some cream and butter." He looked thoughtful for a moment, then frowned. "Oh, and some cabbage. Should have gotten that back at Yamada-san's stall. Oh well, we can always go back."

"Actually," Yuugao said, watching the cloudless sky, "I may have to leave the shopping to you." There were messenger-birds winging out from the direction of the Hokage's tower--or perhaps from the ANBU HQ compound, set a little behind and to the side of the center of village administration. She could count five birds from where she stood, each flying low enough that she could see the scroll-cases tied to their legs. It might not be... But then again, it might. And at least one of those birds was flying in the direction of her apartment.

Suddenly the energy that had been eating at her all day had a focus. That bird _might_ be heading for her apartment, and that scroll _might_ contain news of her acceptance or rejection by ANBU. Whichever it was, Yuugao didn't want to wait to find out.

"Can I come over around dinner-time?" she asked, dropping her eyes to her friend again. "Around six, say?"

"Sure," Izumo answered, watching his friend's eyes track the sky. "Expecting a love note from a secret admirer?" he teased, and pointed to the birds Yuugao was so avidly watching. "I didn't think you went in for elderly gentlemen-types like Hokage-sama."

He ducked, anticipating the thwack on the ear that that remark was likely to engender, and grinned.

"Make sure you get there by 6:15, 'cause like I said, we have to eat early tonight, so Ko can go on patrol at 8:00." It would be nice to have Yuugao's company and help doing the dishes with Kotetsu out on a night patrol.

The thwack came as expected; as expected, the edge of her hand only ruffled his bandana hitai'ate. "I'll leave that to his assistants in the mission office," Yuugao said dryly. She lifted two fingers in a half-rat seal, gathered her chakra, and added, "Six-fifteen. I'll be there."

And then she was gone, in a thin cloud of smoke that faded almost instantly. Not quite as good as Hayate's, but she was getting there.

Fortunately, the market-district was close enough to her building that it took only three translocation jumps to reach the stairs that led up to her second-story apartment. As she'd dared to hope, the messenger bird had perched on the railing just outside her door. Yuugao raced up the stairs, gently extracted the scroll from its case, and tossed the bird up into the air again. Then she took a deep breath, consciously slowed her pounding heart, and let herself into her apartment.

She almost didn't dare let go of the scroll, for fear it might vanish once it left her grasp. But she knew she was being foolish, and she left it on the little table in front of the window for the length of time it took her to make tea and to change the bandage on her leg. Running up the stairs hadn't helped; it had begun to seep again through the stitches. She winced, re-bandaged it, changed into a loose cotton yukata, and finally let herself collect her tea and the scroll.

It seemed almost anti-climactic, when she opened it. A few characters in black ink on white paper, with two scarlet seals at the bottom. She recognized the first as the Hokage's, guessed at the second for ANBU's. The message was very simple:

_ANBU Hunter Squad Six, reorganized 5-25:  
Captain, 011671 Gekkou Hayate  
Hunter, 010243 Tousaki Ryouma  
Hunter, 012161 Uzuki Yuugao  
Hunter and Medic, 012104 Yamane Shou_

And a little to the left, in the same hand:  
_New Hunter Orientation to begin 6-03 at 0800. Bring appropriate documentation and necessary gear._

Yuugao sat still for a long time, staring at the orders--_her_ orders--and the names of her new teammates. Gekkou Hayate... Well, she guess she'd impressed him after all.

Her tea was cold when she finally remembered to finish it. She made a face at the cup and went to rinse it out and start on the rest of the day's chores. It wasn't long until six o'clock, after all, and Izumo and Kotetsu were expecting her.

And _gods_, she had news to tell them.

Kotetsu had, predictably, been delighted to hear that not only was Izumo cooking something _normal and tasty_ for supper like katsudon, but had invited Yuugao to dinner and was making dessert too.

"You're seriously making Cocoa Orgasms?" he asked, cracking and separating eggs at Isumo's direction.

_"Chocolate _Orgasms. You named 'em, least you could do is remember it right," Izumo countered. "And yeah, cause Yuugao bought me dragon fruits, plus we're totally gonna pump her about the ANBU trials."

"Those weird-ass things in the bowl?" Kotetsu asked and glanced at the prickly ovoid fruits Izumo had set on the counter. "I don't see what's so great about those, but yeah, she don't usually take to being liquored up for information, so chocolate's probably the best choice there." He grinned at his friend and handed him the egg yolks.

"You'd understand if you tried one," Izumo said. "And if you'd seen the prices on them. And before you go getting your boxers in a bunch, I didn't spend a thing on em. Yuugao bought me all three."

"Oh man, she _wants_ to talk then," Kotetsu said, and sat down on a kitchen stool. "She tell you anything?"

"Well she about pissed herself when I asked her about it, so she totally gave that away." Izumo grinned and started whipping his egg yolks into a sugary froth. "God help her, she's the most un-kunoichi-like kunoichi I've ever known. Usually they're all about the spying and fake smiles and slipping deadly poison into your tea while they whisper sweet nothings in your ear. She's got less subtlety than you do though, when you ask her a question she doesn't want to answer."

Kotetsu grinned back, and peeked into the pan holding the sizzling cutlets. "So when's she showing? I'm hungry."

"Leave those alone, jerk. They're not done. You want food poisoning?" Izumo flicked a towel at Kotetsu. "And she'll be here in a few minutes. I timed everything. Just got to put the cakes in the oven when we sit down to dinner." He added the cocoa powder next, and the mound of dark chocolate shavings he'd had Kotetsu scrape off a block of expensive imported chocolate. If you were going to make a dessert called an orgasm, after all, you had to do it all the way.

Yuugao had timed herself, too. Now that she was only waiting for dinner and to tell her friends the time flew instead of creeping, and she'd had to race a little to finish everything she'd planned for that afternoon. But six-ten found her just outside Izumo and Kotetsu's apartment, a little dressier than before in a knee-length black skirt and a fitted white shirt. The skirt hid her bandaged thigh, and with her dogtags tucked into her bra and her brown eyes alight with excitement, she looked much less like a typical kunoichi than a girl anxious to share good news with two childhood friends.

Which was true, of course, though most other girls' good news didn't involve acceptance into an elite organization known more for bloodbaths than for bridal showers.

She even greeted Kotetsu cheerfully as he opened the door. "Kotetsu-kun! I heard you finally managed to finagle patrol by yourself. How did you convince them you don't need Izumo holding your hand all the time now?"

All right, so cheerfulness was relative. But they'd been sniping at each other since their Academy days, and by now even the snarkiest of banter ran warm with friendship.

"What a thing to say to a guy who's about to give you an orgasm," Kotetsu said, and laughed when she colored a furious red. "Or should Izumo and I just have our orgasms without you?"

"Knock it off, Ko," Izumo called from the kitchen. "And no, I _didn't _ mean it like that, so don't be taking it that way." Because trust Kotetsu to find whatever bawdy humor he could in just about anything.

"Come on in, Yuugao, I was just about to dish up the rice." Izumo slid a tray with three little bundt cake pans sitting in a bath of water into the oven, then carried the rice cooker to the table and knelt at his place, ladling the sticky grains into three lacquer bowls. The fragrance of freshly cooked rice billowed out in a steamy cloud, mingling with the savory, salty scent of the fried cutlets, sitting on a plate waiting to top the rice. The table was already set with chopsticks and napkins at each place, and a plate in the center with a huge mound of freshly shredded cabbage and three little dipping bowls of spicy mustard and tonkatsu sauce.

"You want egg on yours or plain?"

"Egg, please," Yuugao said, and finally managed to meet Kotetsu's laughing eyes without coloring even more. Usually, in their battles of needling comments and snide jokes, she could more than hold her own. But Kotetsu had discovered, when they were fourteen or so, that even the slightest mention of sex was enough to set her cheeks flaming--and he'd had the advantage ever since. It was only slight comfort that she could beat him every time they sparred (unless he cheated, which he often did. To keep her on her toes, he claimed; to keep from getting pounded by a _girl_, she and Izumo insisted).

She sank gracefully to her knees at her place, along one of the long sides of the little rectangular table, as Kotetsu took his own spot at the head. The news jiggled behind her breastbone, rattled at her teeth; she bent her head, and barely suppressed the edges of the smile that tugged at her lips. Gods, she'd dreamed of this.

But she wasn't about to spoil the beginning of the meal, either. Izumo believed in eating, not just cooking, and conversation waited until all three of them were served and the first few bites taken. Then, at last, Yuugao could say with a lightness none of them would mistake for casual, "For once, I'm ahead of you with the latest news."

"Yeah?" Kotetsu asked, giving Izumo a knowing look. "Spill it. We want the goods." He'd been watching her jiggle anxiously, smiling at her katsudon, even laughing distractedly at his dirty jokes for long enough that her excitement had become contagious. He took another mouthful of pork and cabbage, but didn't take his eyes off Yuugao.

"So," Izumo looked at Yuugao thoughtfully, "you heard, then? Already?" She looked as excited as she had when they were in the academy together and she had a test with a 100 on it to show them.

"I was right about the messenger bird," Yuugao said, and for a moment the pride shone bright as a candle-flame in her eyes. "I've been accepted. Hunter Squad Six, under Gekkou Hayate's command."

She'd wondered more than once that afternoon if he'd had any hand in choosing his team. If she really had performed well enough--impressed him enough--that despite her weakness on the way to the infirmary, despite his broken collarbone, he might have wanted her on his team? Of course it probably didn't work that way; doubtless teams in ANBU were composed the same way they were throughout Konoha, with each possible arrangement carefully considered and ultimately decided by administration as high-level as the Hokage himself. But she knew Hayate a little already, and of all the possible squads she could have been assigned, his was the squad she'd hoped for.

"Hunter?" Kotetsu choked on his mouthful of food.

"Congratulations," Izumo said at the same time, and gave Yuugao a warm smile. "And of course Hunter, idiot. You knew that's what she wanted."

"So are you like, the only chick Hunter then?" Kotetsu continued, wiping his mouth and staring at Yuugao. Was she _really_ doing this? It was one thing to listen to her babble about wanting to be in ANBU someday. Even watching her surpass them in skill and rank hadn't really made it sink in. And after all, ANBU was full of coders and administrative people, and the people who worked in the basements under Morino Ibiki's command. Somehow, Kotetsu had never really believed Yuugao would become a Hunter.

"What he means is congratulations," Izumo said and shot Kotetsu a dark look. _Don't rain on her parade,_ his eyes said.

"What I mean," Kotetsu countered, "is don't go getting your fool self killed."

"Ah, he pretends to care," Yuugao said dryly. She reached over with her napkin and caught a smudge of tonkatsu sauce on the point of Kotetsu's chin. "That's sweet of you, but I have no intention either of being a fool or of getting myself killed." She'd had quite enough of embarrassment at the ANBU trials already, with Hayate--Gekkou-taichou, she should say now. As for death... Well, she had plans for at least the next few years of the rest of her life, and no intention of seeing them overturned.

"I think you're right about me being the only woman in the Hunters, though," she confessed. "They told me when I signed up that there were no women currently serving." The young ANBU who'd collected her forms had seemed amused about it, actually. How many women had he seen try and fail. What would he think, now, that she'd succeeded at last? "There were about five other women who started the exams with me, but only one made it to the final round." And Yuugao had seen her fight; her performance had been fair at best, and her captain had left the ring unscratched. Several of the male candidates hadn't managed to score blood from their examinees either, though. It was probably horrible of her to feel so proud for breaking Haya--Gekkou-taichou's collarbone, but all the same...

"I guess I showed them," she said, and grinned. "We both walked out, but _I_ only needed stitches. And Gekkou-taichou probably won't be using that arm for weeks."

Izumo raised his eyebrows at that. He'd seen her limping and known she'd been hurt. And he'd seen in the latest Shinobi Status Sheets that Hayate was off on a medical, but to think Yuugao had done that to him?

Kotetsu, always the more vocal of their pair, put the same thoughts into words. "You fucked up Gekkou Hayate's arm? _Hayate?_ We play cards with the guy. No way you did that to him. Guy's a total genius with swords. Scary as hell, the one time I had a mission with him."

"What happened?" Izumo asked more calmly. "Is that how you hurt your leg? Fighting Hayate?"

He guessed it made sense that there would be sparring in the trials. There were certainly a fair number of shinobi both ANBU and otherwise who were out of commission for some number of days or weeks now that the ANBU trials were over.

"You _know_ him?" Yuugao demanded, and wasn't sure if that was curiosity or outrage in her voice. Both, probably. If they played cards with the man, they could certainly tell her more about the captain under whom she'd be serving--but if they played cards with him, why hadn't she ever met him? (Well, she was an abysmal card player, but that was besides the point.)

"Sparring with him was my final trial," she said, poking gently at the warm half-mound that remained of her rice. "I broke his collarbone. He cut my leg. Might have severed it, if he hadn't pulled his blow--I didn't pull mine enough." She made a face at her katsudon, remembering. "I felt awful about it, but he said that was the point: for me to try my hardest, and him to hold back." It made her wonder what he'd be like when he wasn't holding back, though. He'd been blindingly fast, even so. "He won the match, of course."

She poked the rice again and then looked up, eyes flitting from Izumo to Kotetsu and back again. "Why didn't I know you know him? What's he like? I mean, I know he's an amazing swordsman--" and surprisingly compassionate, when he might have mocked her; surprisingly gentle, when he could have hurt her-- "but what's he like as a man?"

"Yeah we know him," Kotetsu said. "He's a pal of Iruka's. There were in the same class at the Academy, ahead of us." He grinned slowly then, knowingly, like a cat who's just licked the butter. "You got a crush on him or something? He is pretty good looking."

"For gods' sake, Ko," Izumo said, but he'd caught the same scent his partner seemed to be pursuing. "He's not like a close friend or anything, Yuugao," he continued. "He's just someone we play cards with once in a while. Iruka sets it up, or Anko sometimes. I guess we should invite you, huh? But I thought you didn't like cards."

"Yeah," Kotetsu put in, "anyone who calls clubs 'puppy dog feet' is not ready to run with the big dogs when it comes to cards." He shoved his nearly empty bowl towards Izumo. "More rice."

"Do I look like your wife?" Izumo asked, but he dished up the rice Kotetsu had asked for just the same.

"I was _ten_," Yuugao snapped at Kotetsu. "Forgive me for not matching up to you card-sharks; but then, _I_ never got two weeks' cleaning duty for running lunchtime poker games." She still hadn't exactly mastered the poker-face, which was another excellent reason to look forward to the mask.

Kotetsu's first question wasn't even worth answering. _He_ might believe that no professional relationship could exist entirely free of sexual tension (and might argue, with a cheerful leer, that professional sexual relationships were the most fun anyway) but he was wrong about a great many things. Gekkou-taichou was her captain, now; of course she wouldn't even contemplate having a crush on him. "I just want to know," she said very slowly, as if she were speaking to a small and rather stupid child, "what he's like. If he's easy to get along with. If he'd be a good leader."

"You never got rich avoiding our poker games either," Kotetsu said and grinned. "Though as I recall you managed to talk us into sharing the dango with you when we were flush."

"She helped with the cleaning sometimes, Ko," Izumo said, giving his friend a reproachful look. He reached for Yuugao's bowl and added another scoop of rice and half a cutlet. "Anyway, Hayate's a good guy. Quiet."

"Quiet ain't the word for it," Kotetsu said. "That guy has a poker face like you wouldn't believe. Scary is more like it. Zen-master Hayate."

"I don't think he's really a follower of Zazen," Izumo protested.

"Do you have to take everything so literally?" Kotetsu shot back. "I just mean--like look at last week's game. Guy sat there on a straight flush like he had a pair of dimes and nothing more. Skinned me and Anko alive."

"Because you don't have the sense to fold when you have crap," Izumo laughed.

"I was _bluffing._ It's a _strategy_, Zuzu-chan." Kotetsu grinned and winked at Yuugao.

"Don't _call_ me that!" Izumo snapped.

Yuugao suppressed a sigh and leaned forward, waving her chopsticks in the air between them as if she could use them to slice through the coelescing tension. "Izumo-kun, don't let him get to you. Kotetsu-kun..."

He grinned even wider. She sighed. "Telling you to stop being yourself wouldn't do any good, would it?"

"No'm," he said cheekily.

Resisting the impulse to throw her chopsticks at him, Yuugao rolled her eyes and took another bite of rice instead. "Gekkou-taichou didn't exactly seem quiet or poker-faced when I met him," she said, thoughtfully. "He initiated the conversation, both times. And he has a nice smile."

Izumo and Kotetsu exchanged a quick look at that. Izumo's eyes registering mild surprise, while Kotetsu's radiated pure mischief.

"Nice smile, hmm?" Kotetsu said. "I knew it. You've got the hots for him."

"Ko!" Izumo started to interject, but a timer in the kitchen chimed, interrupting his interruption.

"Ooooh, and now it's time for the orgasms!" Kotetsu said with a grin. A rich chocolaty smell was indeed wafting from the little kitchen, fighting with the spicy, savory scent of the katsudon.

"I'll just go get those out. They need to rest five minutes before we eat them," Izumo said, getting up with an apologetic nod towards Yuugao.

At that moment, Yuugao could equally well have kissed Izumo or killed Kotetsu. Izumo's intervention had stopped Kotetsu from continuing along his sordid line--but unfortunately, Yuugao couldn't just let it rest there.

"I do _not_," she hissed to Kotetsu as Izumo headed into the apartment's tiny kitchen. "Not everyone starts panting after every attractive person they see, even if _you_ do. And he's my captain, anyway," she added.

She realized, just a moment too late, that she'd just labeled Gekkou Hayate as _attactive._

...Maybe she'd have to kill Kotetsu after all.

"Ohhh," Kotetsu said, in an exaggerated drawl, "so you think he's _attractive_ do you? Kind of like the way he _looks?_" He picked up his bowl and shoveled the last few morsels of katsudon into his mouth, watching Yuugao out of the corner of his eye. She was so much fun to tease. Really turned lively colors, and sputtered and got all tongue tied. But you had to know when to stop. If you pushed too far, she'd turn on you like a viper. Anko had nothing on this chick.

"I would like the way you'd look," Yuugao said, carefully and precisely, "when you're dead." She flipped her chopsticks, caught them like senbon between her fingers, and met Kotetsu's eyes with a steady gaze that owed nothing to the blush burning brightly in her cheeks.

At times like this, she could almost be grateful to the anger that flared hard and hot behind her breastbone. It drew her past the blushing and stammering and into a murderous clear-headedness, the same sort of focus she found on missions where only The Job remained to be done. (Not that she seriously meant to kill Kotetsu--but shutting him up was pretty high on that list of priorities.)

Izumo returned to the table to interrupt the carnage. "Don't kill him, Yuugao. He's got patrol in fifteen minutes, and I'm not subbing for him."

"Fifteen minutes?" Kotetsu whined. "How can I enjoy my orgasm with only fifteen minutes?"

It was Yuugao's presence that restrained Izumo's tongue, kept him from voicing the ribald responses that Kotetsu's question just _begged_ for. "You'll just have to suffer, I guess," he said instead, and started to clear away the dinner things. "Help me clear the table, and then we'll have cake."

Kotetsu grumbled but got to his feet, helping to carry dishes to the sink.

"No you sit," Izumo said, when Yuugao got up to try to help, too. "You're the guest, and you have a bum leg besides."

It didn't take long for them to be seated again, with a steaming mound of chocolate topped by melting white ice cream in front of each place.

"Now for my orgasm!" Kotetsu said happily, and dug into his cake with abandon.

...He really, _really_ needed to be hit. Yuugao met Izumo's eyes across the table, pleading. _I won't if you don't want me to--but please, please let me do it..._

Izumo lifted one shoulder in the barest shrug. That was all Yuugao needed to reach out and thwap Kotetsu on the side of the head, the way she'd done since they were children together--though admittedly a bit harder than usual.

"Eat your cake and go on patrol," she said sharply. "And thank the gods and Izumo-kun I haven't yet broken your head."

"Owwwww," Kotetsu whined, and rubbed his poor abused skull. "Did you see that? She hit me."

"Nope," Izumo said, eating his cake. "Didn't see a thing. You must be imagining things."

"Meanie. You always take her side," Kotetsu grumbled, in an old, very familiar routine.

"Yep, that's why I live with you," Izumo said. "'Cause we're enemies."

Kotetsu sniffed, feigning hurt, but he couldn't maintain it for long. The cake was too good for one thing, and the scene comfortingly familiar, eating with his two favorite people. "Well at least you gave me a good orgasm," he said at last, risking another thump from Yuugao.

This time it was Izumo who flicked his ear. He leaned in and said in a low rumble, "I _always_ do, don't I?" then sat back up and smiled at Yuugao. "Actually, no-one can resist my Chocolate Orgasms."

"Mmm," Yuugao said, around a mouthful of sinfully decadent chocolate cake, and decided not to push that angle of the conversation any further. Despite her long friendship with Izumo and Kotetsu, she'd never really been sure whether they were just best friends, or in fact lovers; she'd never asked, and they'd never said. Konoha rumor seemed about equally divided, but really Yuugao couldn't see how it mattered. They were still Izumo-kun and Kotetsu-kun, whether anything happened in their (separate) bedrooms or not.

Of course, sometimes she was certain that the only reason Izumo could possibly put up with Kotetsu was if they had absolutely outstanding sex. But then, she hadn't killed Kotetsu yet, either. So the jury was still out--where it could stay, as far as Yuugao was concerned.

She swallowed (with difficulty; it seemed almost a betrayal to release that last meltingly smooth taste of chocolate on the tongue) and sliced another neat slab of ice-cream and gooey cake onto her fork. "That's why I asked for them," she told Izumo. "Have you figured out what to do with those devil-fruit yet?"

"You talking about those golden spiky horse turds or whatever they are you got for him?" Kotetso asked through a mouthful of cake, glancing at the bowl of fruit on the counter.

"Dragon fruit," Izumo corrected. "And um... not yet. Well fruit salad for sure. And maybe tarts. You know those tarts with custard in the bottom and fruit on top? They'd be pretty in that."

"They better taste good, for what Izumo said they cost," Kotetsu said. "Course not that you gotta worry so much about that. I hear ANBU payscales are off the charts."

Izumo kicked his partner under the table.

"Whaaat?" Kotesu whined.

"Don't be crass. Of course ANBU are well paid. They have a..." Izumo glanced at Yuugao, than away. "Hazardous job," he finished.

Yuugao raised an eyebrow, amused. "You don't need to be politic for my sake, Izumo-kun. I know what I'm getting into." She'd been an active-duty shinobi for years, after all; and she'd done her research, before she'd first made the decision to enter ANBU. The ANBU corps was Konoha's black ops, its bogeymen, the squad with the highest risks and the fewest survivors. There was a reason ANBU held exams for new recruits every six months, after all, and it had very little to do with an expanding corps--as far as Yuugao was aware, it was a constant struggle to keep attrition from wearing numbers down below the acceptable minimum.

But she was good; she knew she was good, and her acceptance into ANBU had proved it. If anyone was meant for the Hunters' ranks, it was Uzuki Yuugao.

"Maybe the higher pay will finally help me catch up to you guys," she said, glancing around the apartment. It was quite a bit larger than her own, with polished wooden flooring everywhere except for the tatami dining area, mis-matched furniture that nevertheless displayed a distinctive flair and eye for style, and two bedrooms leading off from the main room. Several scrolls of her own calligraphy decorated the walls--birthday presents, mostly, with the double-wide scroll emblazoned with side-by-side characters for _dagger_ that she'd given them when they made chuunin together. Her own apartment was cleaner, more sparsely furnished, and much smaller. As a jounin, she probably made half again as much as they did, but the combination of their salaries made the difference.

Still...she didn't really need the extra space; she lived on her own, and she certainly didn't entertain as much as they did. Perhaps she'd work on stocking up her savings account, and refurnish her apartment instead of upgrading to a new one.

"Just make sure you're around long enough to enjoy it," Kotetsu said, and stood up. "And with that cheerful thought, I'm outta here. Patrol 'til some horrible time of day when the sun comes up."

"You don't have that long a shift, do you?" Izumo asked, watching Kotetsu disappear into his bedroom and come out again shrugging on his vest, then tying on his hitai-ate. He shook his long, shaggy hair once he had the bandanna in place, so that the unruly spikes fell all around. He'd wrapped the bandage he tended to wear over his nose in place too. Somehow that bandage, like the masks some shinobi wore, was the symbol for him of a shinobi on duty. It wasn't the only time he wore it, but he was certainly never in uniform without it.

"I'll be back before you know it," Kotetsu said with a grin. "Sorry to leave you with all the dishes, Yuun-chan, but you know, we don't get a woman in here to do the women's work all that often. Gotta take advantage of it when the chance arises."

He beat a hasty retreat before Yuugao could skewer him with whatever weapon she had to hand.

"Someday," Yuugao gritted, looking fixedly at the hastily-slammed door, "he is going to die. Painfully. By my hand." She sighed, finished the last bite of her cake, eyed the empty plate with faint regret, and rose to her feet. Only a slight tension in her brows betrayed the painful pull of her wounded leg. She collected her empty plate and Kotetsu's, and started for the kitchen sink, leaving Izumo to finish the last of his cake. "Usual rotation--I'll wash and you dry?"

"Sure," Izumo said, and rose as well, carrying the last bite of cake with him. When he reached Yuugao he held the plate out to her. "Here, you have the last bite. I'm full." It wasn't entirely true, he _could_ have managed that last mouthful, but well, Yuugao needed it more.

"Don't worry about Ko. He's, you know, he's just Ko."

Taking his place at the side of the sink next to the drainboard he leaned against the counter and smiled at Yuugao. "So tell me about the trials. I mean, if you can."

"He's always been Ko," Yuugao said, in a voice of equal parts exasperation and fondness, waving the offer of his cake away. "I'm fine, thanks, Izumo-kun." She began moving the dishes from the sink to the counter, considering what to tell him. They hadn't exactly _said_ anything about the trials being classified; she supposed they'd assumed that the candidates, high-ranking shinobi themselves, would have sufficient judgment to know what they needed to keep their mouths shut about. Which wasn't much, actually. She set the stopper in the empty sink, dribbled a few drops of dish soap in, and turned the tap on as hot as it would go before she turned to face Izumo.

"The first few days mostly written exams, a couple of informal interviews, an obstacle course where we had to lead a cobbled-together team we'd never met before. Bad food and almost no sleep." She grimaced. Of course the strain they'd put the candidates under had best-simulated field conditions, but she still regretted, a little, her exhaustion on that last day. Her moment of weakness at the doorway hadn't cost her as much as she thought, but that didn't mean the memory didn't swamp her with embarrassment. "The actual fighting trials were on the last day, when they'd winnowed us down. We fought regular ANBU members first, and then a few of us went on to face the captains."

The sink was nearly full now; she switched the water to cold for a few seconds and then shut the tap off. "That's when I fought Gekkou-taichou," she said, dunking the first plate into the hot, soapy water and attacking it vigorously with a scrubbing sponge. "I actually met him between the rounds--he complimented me and said he hoped my next opponent would be just as satisfying." A little smile touched the corners of her mouth as she remembered her fury when she'd recognized him the second time. "I thought he was mocking me. But I think he was serious."

"And then you actually fought _him?_" Izumo asked, taking the first plate from her when she was done with it and drying it with a little mint-green towel before sliding it back into its spot in the cupboard. "And you seriously broke his arm? That's like, scary, Yuugao. Seriously scary."

She'd always been good. Better than he and Kotetsu were, even when they were Academy kids. She was younger by three years, but easily kept up with them, and even though they'd been on different genin teams, she'd remained close. She'd passed her chuunin exams a year before they did, then gone on to surpass them again in rank, rising to jounin, but by then they were such fast friends that rules against fraternizing between ranks would have been pointless to try to enforce. Which was probably why those sort of rules generally weren't adhered to in Konoha. Some villages were stricter about that.

"So damn, ANBU. And you're good enough to break Gekkou Hayate's arm," Izumo nodded, drying another dish. "What was it like fighting him?"

"It was his collarbone, actually," Yuugao corrected. "It didn't slow him much, though." She scrubbed thoughtfully at a few sticky grains of rice clinging stubbornly to the inner curve of a bowl. "He's incredibly fast. Incredibly good. He was holding back, but even so--" She sighed, shook the last suds out of the bowl, and handed it over. "He pulled his blows. I didn't. I still feel bad about that. I'll be fine in a week, but he'll probably be off active duty for a month."

Still...there was that little remorseless glow of pride, lighting her eyes and quickening her movements. She'd outmanuevered Gekkou Hayate, broken his collarbone, disabled his arm. He'd beaten her, of course, but she had that to remember. And the smile: he'd been _proud_ of her.

Yuugao had so seldom had _anyone_ proud of her that it was almost dismaying to realize how much she hungered for it again.

Izumo had to hurry to catch up now, as Yuugao washed faster than he could dry. He set the bowl she handed him in the drain rack and went back to drying plates and chopsticks. "So he was pulling his blows but he still did that to your leg?" he asked, nodding his head towards her bandaged thigh. "And what do you mean it didn't slow him down. He didn't keep fighting you after you broke his collarbone, did he?"

Of course people got hurt during trials. There were even the occasional deaths, although no-one really wanted it to come to that. But still--it was one thing to pit the candidates against one another and let them sort out their skills. It was quite another for an existing squadron member, a captain no less, to be seriously injured in a _trial._ They were needed for missions, weren't they?

She shook her head, tossing back a few strands of disobedient dark violet hair. "He kept fighting. Pulled a smoke jutsu, tucked his hand into his shoulder-strap to stabilize his shoulder, and kept going one-handed." There was more than a trace of admiration in her voice. "He actually cut my leg and then had his katana to my throat before I could do _anything._ I told you he was incredibly fast--he even figured out my _ko-shuurai,_ and deflected them with _kage bunshin_. That was how I distracted him long enough to get a kick in."

After that he'd been totally justified in slicing her leg--in doing even more than he'd done. She'd heard from the medics in the infirmary what had happened to Yamanaka-taichou's candidate, and she knew she was more than lucky to have fought Gekkou-taichou. To have been chosen for his team. She'd have to prove herself worthy of it, now.

"Damn, that's hard core," Izumo said, and whistled softly. "Guess that's what you get, it being ANBU and all." He shook his head as he took the last of the dishes from Yuugao, dried them and put them away. "And that's what you really want. Even now that you've seen that and everything, huh?"

What he didn't say was, _There's no going back if you make this choice._ Yuugao had talked about joining ANBU for almost as long as he could remember. But then it had been a twelve-year-old Izumo saying _someday I'll be Hokage_, Kotetsu bragging _someday I'll be rich as a daimyou_--it hadn't been _real_. Only now it was.

"If it's what you want. Really, _really_ what you want, Yuugao, then..." Izumo shrugged helplessly. "We'll gang up on Hayate and beat him senseless if he, you know, gets you hurt or anything." It was an empty threat, given what Yuugao had just said about the other man. But it needed to be made nonetheless.

Yuugao laughed, soft and warm. "I am sure; it's what I've always wanted." Certainly since she was old enough to know that the ANBU were the best, the strongest, the guardians of Konoha and the epitome of its shinobi. Since she was old enough to know that making it into ANBU meant that you'd proved yourself beyond anyone's doubt.

"And that's sweet of you, Izumo-kun, but I don't think it'll be necessary." Not that she wouldn't get hurt--she was a shinobi; she'd spent her life getting hurt. But from what little she knew or guessed of her new captain, she didn't think he was the kind to be careless with his subordinates' lives. Not when he'd been so concerned over her in the hallway.

But thinking of that brought up something else that she'd wondered about. Yuugao pulled the stopper, letting the soapy water drain away, and took the towel from Izumo to dry her hands. "Gekkou-taichou isn't--woman-shy, by any chance, is he?"

Izumo looked up, eyes alight with amusement. "You mean is he gay? No I don't think so. He was dating a civilian chick for a little while, but I'm pretty sure they broke up last fall," he said with a little laugh.

"Why? Was Kotetsu a little too close to the mark there after all? You like him or something?"

The blush on Yuugao's face didn't prove anything one way or the other about that. She could just be embarrassed to have asked the question she did. But it would still be interesting fodder for speculation with Kotetsu when he came home. _Very_ interesting.

"I told you I don't!" Yuugao said impatiently, wishing to all the gods that her face didn't betray her anytime _anything_ happened. A mask would be very, very welcome indeed. She leaned back against the sink, pressing her finger-tips to her burning cheeks and trying to will the blood back to normal circulation. "But he reacted--interestingly when I was wondering whether I should give him my shirt for a sling. So I wasn't sure." She shrugged. The heat in her face was dying again, at least. "I just wondered if it was something I should be aware of."

But apparently he leaned towards women after all. Most of the young men she knew would've cheerfully encouraged her to go ahead with her charitable donation. Apparently, Hayate Gekkou-taichou was different.

"You offered to take off your shirt to make a sling?" Izumo choked, laughing so hard he started wheezing. "Oh gods in heavens, Yuugao. I don't think you can really blame him for reacting to that, can you? He was probably trying not to pop a boner at the very idea." Izumo's laughter continued for several minutes, until he was as red-faced as Yuugao.

"Gods, woman, try not to do that to your poor captain."

"He declined very politely," Yuugao said, as stiffly as she could manage when her cheeks were flaming again and the memory of Hayate's rushed refusal was re-playing in her mind. Despite herself, her lips twitched. "And his warning about a couple hundred meters left to walk suddenly became only a few." She rubbed her cheeks and laughed again at last. "You should have seen his _face_, Izumo-kun..."

Not that she wouldn't have given him her shirt, willingly, if he'd accepted it. But though she'd never have admitted it, it was a little reassuring to hear Izumo's opinion on the matter; if _he_ didn't think Gekkou-taichou had been stammering in disgust, then it probably wasn't true.

"I'm sure it was priceless," Izumo agreed. "And that's actually saying something. You heard what Ko said about Hayate's poker face. You must have really startled him." He grinned and patted Yuugao's shoulder. "Just watch out you don't end up seducing your new comrades by accident. Course some of 'em that won't be an issue with, being as it's ANBU and all." He winked at her as she started back towards the sitting room.

"If there's ever any seducing," Yuugao said wryly, "the only way it's going to happen is by mistake." She meant what she'd said to Kotetsu; attractive or not, Gekkou-taichou was her captain. She had no intention of things ever moving to any other level. 

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Three_

_A recipe for the Chocolate Orgasms can be found at:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com / 4200 . html _


	4. First Day

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on out livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 4: First Day**_

Yuugao didn't sleep well the night before ANBU Hunter Orientation was to begin. It had been another unseasonably warm day, and was almost an unbearably warm night; she was sweat-drenched and tangled in sheets when she woke after a few hours of restive sleep. By then it was nearly six o'clock. She gave up the attempt to sleep, and headed for the shower. Twenty minutes of warm water left her feeling much better-tempered, if not much less tense. She focused extra time and concentration on drying and brushing her hair, hoping the familiar task would calm her nerves. It didn't seem to help the small animals in her stomach much, but at least her hair was sleek and shining when she finally left the bathroom in search of clothes and breakfast.

The short, official notice had mentioned only to bring _necessary gear_. She didn't know exactly what that entailed, but she'd spent most of the previous afternoon checking every item in her shuriken holster and hip pouch, sharpening kunai to razor edges, replenishing low stocks of bandages and explosive tags, arranging shuriken to come easily to groping fingers. It took only a few seconds to dress in the modified uniform she typically wore on missions: mesh shirt over her breast-bindings, dark blue shorts, a hip-length sleeveless overshirt belted at the waist with a sash that could easily double for a garrote. It was seven-thirty by the time she finished fastening her shuriken-holster to her right leg, and she spared only a few minutes for toast and jam in her little kitchen before she double-checked her gear, tucked her dog-tags under her shirt and her papers into her hip-pouch, tugged on her sandals, and headed out the door.

By this time of morning, Konoha was already alive and bustling. A few Academy children raced by, late on their way to school; an old man wheeling his barrow of tomatoes to market called a cheerful greeting. Birds darted overhead, and a fresh breeze brought a little relief to what promised to be another oppressively hot day. Yuugao took a deep breath of the clear morning air and wished her stomach would stop its nervous knotting. She'd already passed; she was already (almost) officially a member of ANBU. What did she have to fear?

...Well, quite a lot, actually, and it only started with the prospect of spending the day with an unknown number of the other rookies--several of whom had made it clear, in the early trials, that they hadn't expected women to apply and certainly didn't expect any to make the cut.

Perhaps they'd been cut, instead. That thought was a great deal more cheering. Yuugao was nearly smiling when she reached the barred gate of the ANBU complex. Then she recognized the man approaching from the other direction, and the near-smile died along with her luck.

"_You_ made it?" That was shocked horror if she'd ever heard it, coming from a dark-haired young jounin with an expression like someone smelling bad eggs. "Good gods, I didn't think they'd actually--"

Yuugao desperately wished she could say the same; but as she recalled, Yonda Daisuke had acquitted himself well in the exams. It was no surprise they'd let him in. A lifetime of disreputable friendship with Izumo and Kotetsu had half a dozen more-or-less biting retorts springing to her tongue, all the same. She restrained herself with an effort--_she_ couldn't afford to start out on a bad foot, even if he was willing to make a fool of himself--and said merely, "Good morning to you, too, Yonda-san. Your shuriken-holster's coming undone."

"Huh?" He glanced down, taken aback. By the time he was looking up again in argument, she was already through the gate.

Two other rookies were already gathered in the courtyard in front of the ANBU compound, standing a little nervous distance apart. Yuugao couldn't remember either of their names, but at least she didn't remember either of them as being particularly unfriendly. She took up a position just behind the taller one, closed her eyes, and practiced breathing. It didn't help her temper much when Yonda came to stand at her elbow, but at least it helped her ignore him.

Orientation couldn't begin soon enough.

Hayate's morning was, in contrast to Yuugao's, altogether laid-back. The most difficult part of it had been washing his hair with his shoulder still aching and protesting. It was healing well, though, Oda-sensei had said. He was already doing light physical therapy to rehabilitate the joint, while the chakra-fused collarbone developed more sturdy, natural healing. He still had to wear the sling, though, which was another annoyance. To save time, he decided to don his ANBU uniform in his apartment, rather than change at HQ. It meant heading in to the office in mask and gear, but that was better than struggling out of an ordinary jounin's uniform and into his ANBU kit in the locker room, and having to maneuver around the sling. Yamanaka Hiroshi would be there, no doubt, since he was scheduled to give the orientation with Hayate, and Hayate didn't really want to hear about how stupid it was that he'd let a rookie _girl_ break his shoulder.

He sauntered through Konoha's streets at 7:15, pausing to tip his masked face to the woman he bought a newspaper from. She knew him in and out of uniform, and Hayate often wondered if she'd connected the two. Surely she must, he thought, but there was an effect the ANBU uniform had that seemed to lead civilians away from, rather than towards conjecture. It was rare, in fact, that this woman was as friendly to him when he had his mask on as when he did not.

Approaching the gated ANBU compound, he tried to recall his first day there. It had seemed grand and imposing, though now it was merely the headquarters he called home. He checked in at the desk as he entered, then stopped in the mess hall for a bowl of rice with egg and natto, and a steaming bowl of miso soup. He was reading his paper when Yamanaka Hiroshi sat down across from him, scraping his chair noisily back.

"Ready for the rookies?" Hiroshi asked, and held up his sheaf of papers on the new recruits. "You're acting mighty relaxed for a man about to bring in ANBU history."

"You pay no attention to what other people say, do you?" Hayate asked mildly, sipping at his soup. "I'm assuming you're talking about my new squad member. Ryuuhei said there have been women Hunters since ANBU's inception."

"Yeah, but this one smacked you down. How's the arm?" Hiroshi almost sounded genuinely concerned. There was just the hint of an edge to his voice.

"Fine. Getting better," Hayate answered, looking up at his tall companion at last. "And it looks like your face is better. Just looks like a sunburn now."

"Yeah," Hiroshi said, and touched the slightly flaky red skin on his forehead. "And my hair's back to normal."

"Gods forbid your hair should look bad," Hayate teased. He finished up his rice and folded his paper up neatly. "You ready? I'm stopping by my office, but I guess it's about time."

Both men glanced at the clock: 0750. "Yeah, the runts should be out there getting anxious by about now. I say we make 'em wait til 0805," Hiroshi said with a grin.

Hayate gave a slow, unimpressed sniff. "I'll meet you on the parade grounds at 0800," he said. "If you want to make them wait, we'll have to do it after lunch. Quartermaster expects us to hand them all off to him at 0815." And even Hiroshi knew better than to cross the quartermaster.

Hayate was unsurprised when Hiroshi met him at the doors to the parade grounds at precisely 0759. Both men pulled their masks into place - Hayate's blue and black hare face, and Hiroshi's green abstract bird. They pushed the doors open and strode out to find the seven Hunter recruits standing around in irregular and anxious looking clumps. Yuugao, he was pleased to see, was there, looking tense and keyed up, but ready for this. Good, she hadn't chickened out, as some of the more misogynistic captains had predicted.

"Gentlemen," Hiroshi said.

Hayate coughed.

"And lady," Hiroshi added, with a mock bow towards Yuugao. "Welcome to ANBU. From here on out, your lives will never be the same."

From the moment the doors in front of her squeaked open, and two ANBU captains stepped out to face the nervous rookies, Yuugao forgot all about Yonda standing silent and ominous at her shoulder. He couldn't worry her, but _these_ men held her future in their hands--

Or hand. Gekkou-taichou's hare-faced mask was as memorable as the left arm now neatly bound in a cloth sling. Yuugao winced and tried even harder to concentrate on the captains' words.

The taller captain, in a green-and-white mask, did most of the talking. His introduction was calculated to be both inspiring and intimidating, she thought; he reminded the rookies that they had made it while most did not, that they had joined the ranks of the elite amongst the elite. But they were also, from this day forward, even more anonymous. He touched his own mask in emphasis, and Gekkou-taichou dipped his head.

"You'll face death," the taller captain said. "Your missions will be rougher and dirtier and nastier than they've ever been--but they'll also support Konoha more than any of your missions ever have. You'll operate on missions of village security as well as on the missions that will bring Konoha the most prestige--and the most cash. But _your_ name will never be known. Once you wear the mask, outside these walls you are nameless, faceless; you exist to be a weapon for Konoha. You'll likely die in this service. Several of you are here to replace those agents who did."

_Am I?_ Yuugao wondered. She glanced towards Gekkou-taichou again, but the painted ceramic face was as empty and still as ever. She bit her lip, and wondered if she'd ever know.

"Five of you have been assigned to squads already," the first captain concluded. "The other two will be put in the pool of unassigned agents. You'll be snatched up by any team that needs your particular skills for any mission. But none of you will be meeting your teams yet. Quartermaster's expecting you." His head tilted slightly in Gekkou-taichou's direction, as though sharing a private joke. "You'll get your first issue of uniform and weapons, and then we'll be hustling you through to the infirmary for check-ups and your tattoos." One gloved finger reached out to tap the scarlet tattoo inked into Gekkou-taichou's bare, muscled shoulder. "Any questions?"

Yuugao had plenty, but she wasn't going to ask them now. She looked straight ahead, and tried very hard to ignore Yonda raising his hand behind her.

"Just one, Taichou," he said in a voice rough with mock gentleness. "I'm a little concerned for our--_lady_, here. Are you sure--"

He broke off with a strangled gasp, and staggered back. Yuugao rubbed her sandaled foot lightly against the inside of her leg and tried not to smile.

If Hayate had been a slightly less controlled man, he would have laughed, seeing Yuugao crushing the bigger man's instep without so much as a blink. Several of the rookies who caught what had just happened did snicker, and Yonda was red-faced and spluttering. Of course these things could get out of hand, what with these being a cadre of highly aggressive, highly trained killers. Hayate turned his masked face just a fraction, just enough for Yuugao, if she was paying attention, to realize he was looking right at her. He wondered if she'd sense the smile behind his blank porcelain expression.

"If there are no _procedural_ questions," he said with just a hint of irony, "then please follow Yamanaka-taichou and me to the quartermaster. Before we go, I have two pieces of important advice for you: One, try not to make an enemy of the man who issues your equipment, or you are likely to find yourself stocked with natto-flavored rat bars on your next mission." The rookies chuckled, and Hayate waited for it to die down before he continued.

"Two," he said, and turned to look at Yuugao and Yonda again, "no matter what you might think of each other when you are not in uniform, once you don your mask and vest, you are ANBU, you are comrades, and you are each other's blood. There is no bond more important than that of one agent to another, save that of all agents to the Hokage himself." He paused to let his words sink in, then stood a little straighter, touching his right hand to the tattoo on his left shoulder in a salute that, by the time these rookies were in the service for more than a week, they would come to recognize as the solemn mark of a deeply sworn oath.

"Am I clear?"

"Hai!" Seven voices blended into one; Yuugao could barely make out her own clear high alto among the chorus of tenors and baritones. Of course that rebuke was aimed at her, but it wasn't so sharp as it might have been. That, at least, was something to be grateful for. Even if Yonda was still swearing under his breath.

"Right, then," the man who must be Yamanaka-taichou said, lifting a gloved hand in a casual summons. "Follow us." He turned with just the hint of a limp, and headed for the doors again. After a half-second's hesitation, the rookies struck out after him.

Yuugao hung just a little behind. She didn't want Yonda at her back--though he seemed anxious enough to catch up to Yamanaka-taichou--and she'd noticed that Gekkou-taichou was still standing to one side of the door, waiting to bring up the rear. She caught the door from the hulking rookie (Akimichi Touji, if she remembered correctly) just in front of her, and stepped back again, holding it for the man who would be her captain.

"I apologize for my...impropriety, taichou," she said quietly. "I assure you it won't happen again."

"I'd be more surprised," Hayate answered in a light voice, "If it did not. I'm afraid you are likely to run into some of that attitude fairly often. You will have to find a way to earn their respect without making enemies, Uzu... Yuugao." He had to make an effort to use her personal name, but that was his point to her, was it not? That her gender didn't make any difference to him, even if it did to some of the others? And if she were male, he knew, he'd have called her by her first name unhesitatingly, just as he did with Shou and Ryouma.

He wished he had better advice for her than just that, but there wasn't much he could tell her. Certainly not from personal experience. "You should at least be relieved to know, " he said at last, "that your squadmates, whom you'll meet this afternoon, do not harbor overt prejudices against your gender."

Her rookie status might be another matter entirely. But she'd prove herself, he was sure. It was why, after all, he'd argued so strongly for her inclusion in ANBU.

Yuugao wasn't so sure about that _overt_--did it mean she should be looking out for more subtle prejudice? Easier tasks on missions, or teammates expecting her not to pull her full weight? But Gekkou-taichou had at least admitted when he'd been holding back on her, and he'd encouraged her to give everything she had in return. Yuugao sighed. "I couldn't stomp on every foot in ANBU, even if that _was_ the best way to win their respect." She'd just have to win it the way she'd won everything else in her life, by hard work and stubbornness and a solid facade of utter indifference. She could pretend that it didn't matter what anyone else thought, and she could pretend it well enough to convince everyone but herself.

The door swung shut behind them as they stepped into the cool, air-conditioned lobby. At the head of the group, Yamanaka-taichou was pointing out the front desk and the young ANBU seated behind it, keeping the register of every agent who entered and exited. After this morning their names would be on that log as well, and they would never pass through ANBU's doors without checking in or out. The agent behind the desk gave them a cheery thumbs-up, and their little group swept on again.

Their pace was a little slower than any of them might normally walk; Yuugao guessed it was due to Yamanaka-taichou's injured leg. Ordinarily she might have chafed a little at the slow pace, but now she used the time to glance around her, taking in the notices tacked to the walls and the scarred doors and the occasional uniformed but unmasked agent who passed them. She used the time, too, to discretely observe Gekkou-taichou as best as she could.

He was a little taller than she was, almost as slender; the muscles in his bare arm looked hard, defined by constant exercise. He was strong, she remembered, and fast--well, his speed would be a goal for her to achieve. His dark hair looked shaggy, as if he'd gone several months past the time when he should have had it cut, and the white band of his sling was very bright against his black collar. Yuugao nibbled on her bottom lip.

"I hope your shoulder's healing well," she offered awkwardly, after a minute. "I know I apologized already, but--I'm _still_ sorry, if that matters."

She couldn't help wishing that he'd tip his mask back again, the way he had after their match together; it was so much easier to talk to a man when she could see his face.

"I told you before you have nothing to apologize for," Hayate said mildly. "But I appreciate your concern. My shoulder is much better, thank you. How is your leg?" He actually already knew the answer to that question, since he'd checked with the medic who'd treated her almost daily for status reports. He knew she'd gotten the stitches out, it had healed well, and she'd been released back to active duty.

The other rookies were staring around at the interior of the forbidden cloister that ANBU HQ was. How odd, Hayate remembered thinking, back when he'd been a rookie, that inside it looked like any other administrative building. There were briefing rooms, notices tacked on the wall about changes to security protocols and intramural shuriken tag tournaments. There were old, blotchy looking vinyl chairs in the lobby, and signs on the wall directing seekers to various departments.

He watched Yuugao, wondering what she was making of it. Her hair, he noted, was still a satiny and distracting waterfall of deep eggplant purple. It was something he'd have to work extra hard not to think about. She was his subordinate now, after all.

"My leg?" Yuugao glanced down self-consciously, as if she could still expect to see the pale pink line of the new scar through the dark fabric of her shorts. "It's fine. I had the stitches out last week." Hard to believe that it really had been eleven days since that last trial; the time between acceptance and orientation had alternately dragged and flown. Yuugao smiled a little at the floor. "We'll have to have a rematch soon, when I'm at top form and before _you_ are. It may be my only chance to impress you."

She glanced up quickly at him, and the half-smile lingered just a little. Of course, he might be the kind of captain who expected nothing less than complete and serious devotion out of his subordinates; and if he were, she could do it. But she thought--and hoped, a little--that he wasn't. That perhaps, even as her captain, he might still be willing to smile back.

Hayate blinked, inclining his head to the left, towards Yuugao. "You've already impressed me, " he said quietly, almost so low that she would have to lean in to hear him, "or you wouldn't be here."

Before the conversation could carry on, though, they rounded a corner to find themselves standing in front of a bank of three windows set into a wall.

"Quartermaster," Hiroshi announced to the rookies, and made a sweeping gesture with his hand towards the office they now faced. A spiral emblem matching the tattoo that swirled over his and Hayate's shoulders was emblazoned on each window, along with a list of hours.

"They're never really shut," Hiroshi continued, "but if it isn't an emergency, I advise against attempting to get new gloves at three in the morning."

Hayate nodded and joined his colleague in front of the rookies. He reached up and pushed his mask back, now, taking it off and holding it thoughtfully, showing his bare face for the first time.

"You'll be getting these today, along with your uniforms. We generally don't wear them inside the compound, but outside..." He gestured back towards the lobby they'd left behind. "I suspect none of you have ever seen an ANBU in uniform without his mask."

"Unless he was dying," Hiroshi added. He pushed his own mask up, revealing an unsmiling, though handsome face.

"Unless he was dying," Hayate agreed.

There was a long, silent moment, and then a barrel-chested older man stepped out of a door next to the windows. "Well, Yamanaka-taichou, Gekkou-taichou," he said, and sounded vaguely unhappy to see them. "So you've brought me my new rookies to equip? Alright, line up over there and come when I call you."

The rookies shuffled over obediently, not without a few regretful glances back at the two captains; even as jounin and (mostly) big burly men, they felt a little adrift here, in a new world where they didn't yet fit in. But Gekkou-taichou was speaking in a low voice to the quartermaster, and Yamanaka-taichou seemed to be waiting for him to finish. When he did, Yamanaka-taichou rubbed at a reddened cheek (_sunburn?_, Yuugao wondered) and announced, "Quartermaster's got you for the next three-quarters of an hour. When you're done here, one of his boys'll take you on to the infirmary to get your tattoos. We'll pick you up there."

And that was it, and in the next moment they were gone. Gekkou-taichou's translocation was a little cleaner than Yamanaka-taichou's, a little faster, but Yuugao didn't think she could have mastered even the taller man's speed and control--and she was, she knew from watching the other trials, clearly the fastest of the rookies. There was a reason these men were in command.

She had a while to think over it. Whatever list the Quatermaster had was clearly alphabetical; he called "Akimichi Touji," and spent the next ten minutes barking orders that sent assistants scurrying for progressively larger sizes in uniforms, sandals, armor. Poor, hulking Touji looked a little embarrassed at all the fuss, and at last he accepted the last of his gear (one set of everything; they'd have the rest issued in a few days) and rejoined them in the line, as "Fujiwara Kai" was called up to the front. Yuugao closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. She had a while to wait.

Most of the rookies were outfitted much faster than Touji had been, but even so, they were approaching perilously close to their time limit before Yuugao's name was called. To her surprise, the Quartermaster looked at her with something much more like satisfaction than surprise.

"I _knew_ keeping those modified sets would come in handy," he said, almost cheerfully. "Fifty kilograms, mm? And--hmm...one hundred and seventy centimeters?"

"One hundred and sixty-nine, actually," Yuugao said, a little embarrassed. She stood a head shorter than most of these men, weighed at least thirty kilos less than all of them. _Lightweight_ was nothing less than true, even if she probably _could_ pound their faces into the floor. But the Quartermaster just nodded and snapped out an order to his assistants, who returned quickly with armfuls of thin black clothing, silvery body armor, black boot-sandals and leg-wraps. The first assistant hesitated a moment, holding the shirt and pants out to her and looking indecisively around him.

"We haven't really got a changing room, but there's a bathroom in the back..."

"It's fine," Yuugao said, quickly. She'd spent her entire adolescence on a genin team with two boys, after all, and she'd changed and washed in their company too many times to count. Strangers weren't that different, especially if she didn't intend to give them any reason to treat her differently from any other agent. With quick, efficient movements, she peeled out of her clothing and stepped into the black uniform pants and sleeveless, turtle-necked shirt. They were both as slim-fitting as anything Yuugao had ever worn in her life; and the padded body-armor must have been modified as well, because it clung to her spare curves as if it had been molded to her.

"These belonged to Izumi-san, four years back," the Quartermaster said absently, in answer to her unspoken question. He had his back to her, and was studying a wall hung with masks painted as gaily as if they were for a children's carnival. "She's retired with a baby now, I hear..."

"Two of 'em," one of his assistants corrected, handing Yuugao a pair of elbow-length black gloves reinforced with metal plates on the backs of the hands. "Married one of her old genin teammates," he told Yuugao chattily. "She's teaching part-time at the Academy now."

"Ah," Yuugao said, pulling her gloves on and buckling on the curved arm-guards over them. Was that a hint--that a woman's place was at home with her children, not out here with a sword? But Izumi-san had served, and served well if she'd retired with health and strength. Her armor was still in good condition, smelling faintly of worn canvas and leather-oil. The vest hugged Yuugao's ribs when she breathed, like an old friend's arms.

"Not Izumi's mask for you, though," the Quartermaster said, still perusing the wall. He seemed to be particularly caught by one mask hanging in the top corner, and after a moment more he fetched it down. It was vaguely feline, with round eye-holes, a painted cat's mouth, and a wavy scarlet line on each cheek and running down the forehead. "Cat for you," he told her, holding it out. "Proud, aloof, elegant--" And here his dour face finally cracked a smile. "We heard about your match with Gekkou-taichou. You'll do well here, girl."

"Thank you," Yuugao said, quietly. She took the mask, and fitted it to her face. The world was cool suddenly, dark, limited; her peripheral vision narrowed, and her breath seemed oddly loud. She took the mask off again and smiled at the Quartermaster and his assistants. "Thank you."

"Welcome," the Quartermaster said, gruff and busy again, and shouted at last for "Yonda Daisuke!"

Hayate left the rookies to the quartermaster, left Hiroshi to his own devices (he really didn't want to hear another word about his new "girl" from the man,) and headed back to his office. It was a small, windowless room on an interior corridor on the second floor, just like all the ANBU captains' offices. Inside were crammed a filing cabinet, three desks and four chairs, and a battered looking love seat that had obviously been slept on a time or two. The walls were adorned with a wooden rack holding three katana, an assortment of small city maps and one large topographical map of Fire Country, a row of pegs from which hung a couple of weapons holsters and med kits, and one cracked and blackened ANBU mask--a boar.

Hayate didn't really look at any of it. His eyes slid over the clutter like a breeze over ice, ignoring everything that was in its place, and the few things that weren't, including the three partly-filled cups of tea, now cold and dank, and an empty curry bowl from the place across the street, that littered his desk. He settled himself on the loveseat, curling up on it like a cat, and opened his paper. He should, he supposed, go over the plans for the afternoon. But there wasn't much left to do. The rookies would get their uniforms and tattoos, then he and Hiroshi would rejoin them, give them a tour of the building, explain how missions were alloted and assigned, take them all to the cafeteria for lunch, and then they'd join their new teams.

Once he had Yuugao with Shou and Ryouma in the afternoon, they'd spend some time getting to know one another, maybe spar a little. Something to start to forge the bonds that would be essential to Squad Six's survival. But there wasn't much more planning to do. Not really.

He was reading the sports page when he sensed a presence in his doorway and glanced up.

"Yo," came a cheerful greeting. A slender, smiling blond man in an ANBU Hunter's uniform was leaning casually against the door.

"Genta," Hayate greeted him, sitting up with a smile, obviously pleased to see his friend.

"Heard your rookie is already making friends with mine," Genta said, still grinning, and perched on the loveseat next to Hayate. "Shove over and make some room, gimp. How's your arm?"

"Better," Hayate said, sitting the rest of the way up and putting his paper aside. "And news travels fast."

"Yeah well, I think a few people saw her put Yonda in his place." Genta laughed again, but his light blue eyes turned a little more serious. "I'm gonna have trouble with this one, I can already tell. People think you got the shaft cause you got the chick, but it's really Squad Three that's gonna suffer if that guy doesn't kill the attitude."

Hayate nodded in sympathy. "He was good in the trials, but..." Yonda Daisuke had been one of the most hotly contested recruiting decisions, back in that captains' meeting. Hayate and Genta had both voted no. "I really don't see why Ryuuhei assigned him to your squad, after the way that meeting went."

"He came to me later and asked me to take him. Said his skills meshed well with my team," Genta said. "With Isato gone," he hesitated just slightly as he spoke the name of his deceased subordinate, "we needed another ninjutsu specialist. And Ryuuhei said he thought if anyone could get Yonda to fall in line, it would be me."

"Either that or make him run screaming," Hayate said with a wry smile. "He seems like the kind of guy who has something to prove about his masculinity."

"Yeah, well," Genta laughed. "There are a thousand and one ways to be a man, my sensei always said. If Yonda's gonna survive ANBU, he'll learn to deal with all of them, including my way."

Hayate chuckled, then sighed, growing more sober, and glanced up at the damaged mask on the wall. "You think your team is ready for a new member? It's been three months since Fukashi died, and it still feels weird to have someone new."

"Isato died two months ago," Genta said, in a soft, serious voice. "Squad Three _needs_ a stable ninjutsu specialist. We've been drawing from the open pool, same as you, but it's easier to pick up a taijutsu floater than a ninjutsu user and work him into the team."

"Yeah," Hayate agreed. "We've got Ryouma. It's definitely easier knowing what to expect."

"Well anyway," Genta said and stretched, "it'll either work or it won't. But you know me, I usually make things work."

"If you need any help..." Hayate offered.

"Dude, you're gonna be the one who needs help, not me," Genta retorted. "I just have a lippy kid with a chip on his shoulder and an inferiority complex about the size of his dick; _you've_ got the first chick hunter since Izumi retired."

"She left before I joined," Hayate said. "You knew her?"

"Yeah, I was on her team when I was a rookie," Genta said. "She was awesome. Scary as hell, batshit crazy, and really, really awesome."

"Coming from you," Hayate said, "that's a high recommendation."

Genta glanced at his watch, then at Hayate's clock. "We should go. Rookies will be about done in the infirmary soon." He stood, then extended a gloved hand to Hayate, who took it and let Genta pull him to his feet.

"How much longer you gotta be in that sling?" Genta asked, as they headed down the hall.

"Couple weeks, according to Oda-sensei," Hayate answered with a frown.

"Damn. Sucks to be you," Genta teased. "Guess your rookie already has a big head about it."

"No, actually," Hayate said, thinking of Yuugao's gentle, worried look. "She seems really sorry about it."

"Ouch, man, that's even worse!" Genta said with a laugh.

"Maybe," Hayate said. "Well, we'll see anyway. I don't think she thinks I'm a total wimp."

"Yeah," Genta said. "That'd be Yamanaka who thinks that."

"Thinks what?" Hiroshi asked, joining his colleagues on their way to collect the rookies.

"Nothing," Hayate said.

"Yep, nothing at all," Genta laughed. "Empty headed Yamanaka."

"Oi, shut it," Hiroshi complained, but then they were at the Infirmary, and could see their rookies milling about inside. No more time for banter.

The medics went in alphabetical order, too; but they went in reverse. With four medics detailed to attend to the rookies, they also went in shifts. Yuugao set her jaw at the first stab of the needle in her bare shoulder, and spent the next thirty minutes in painful dignified silence as the needle jabbed away. Cleaned and bandaged at last, she went back to lean against the wall while the remaining three new rookies jostled into place for their tattooing.

There was a lot more waiting than she'd expected, Yuugao decided, resting her head against the wall and briefly closing her eyes. Her ears still buzzed with the medic's lecture on care of her new tattoo; he seemed to expect she'd be ripping the bandage off and scratching it as soon as she was out of his eyesight. Well, she had even less desire to repeat the process than he did, and no desire at all to risk scabbing or infection. Keeping her shoulder covered while she showered for the next two weeks would be a major pain, though.

She heard the lecture again, in even more detail, when the medics finished with the last three of the rookies. No direct sunlight, no soaking, no strain that might stretch the skin and turn Konoha's emblem of pride into a blurry mess. Hideyoshi-sensei probably knew his words were falling on mostly-deaf ears, Yuugao decided as she glanced at two rookies playing a discreet game of jan-ken-pon beside her. No wonder he sounded so frustrated.

Or, of course, it could be because he was still only warming to his subject--and the captains were already waiting outside. There were three of them now; a slim, pale-haired man had joined Gekkou-taichou and his tall blond companion. Through the wide glass window beside the door, Yuugao could see them talking as they waited for the medic's lecture to finish. Yamanaka-taichou seemed a little less patient than the others. As Hideyoshi-sensei was still reminding them about the effects of scabbing on a tattoo, Yamanaka-taichou pushed the door open and leaned in.

"Oi, we're behind schedule already. Gekkou can lecture them on the rest of it--gods know he doesn't get to lecture people enough already." He stepped back, holding the door open, and jerked his thumb behind him. "C'mon, kids, out!"

"When their tattoos get blurred or infected," Hideyoshi-sensei said nastily, "don't send them to _me._" He stripped off his rubber gloves and turned away, pointedly busying himself with cleaning up his tattooing station.

Yuugao was almost surprised to find herself trading a long, significant glance with the hulking rookie beside her. Akimichi Touji looked a little embarrassed at the fuss. "Can't wait until they're not passing us around like kids," he rumbled. "I think I'm glad I'm not on his team."

"Whose team are you on?" Yuugao inquired, as they passed through the door. Yamanaka-taichou had already taken off; Gekkou-taichou was talking quietly with the new captain, and waiting to bring up the rear again. Yuugao had to lengthen her stride to keep in step with Touji, but he seemed to be walking a little slower than usual, to stay with her.

"Tenzou-taichou, Squad Two," Touji said. He reached for his left shoulder absently, as if to scratch the bandage, and immediately curled his fingers into a fist and stuffed it into his pocket. "Don't know him, but he fought Hiromi in the last exams." He cast her what might have been a shy look, if he weren't nearly two feet taller than she was. "I didn't see you fight Gekkou-taichou, but I heard about it. And I can see the story was true."

"He was holding back on me," Yuugao said hastily. She could feel the blush burning in her cheeks already.

Fortunately, Yamanaka-taichou chose that moment to begin a running commentary that took them up a flight of stairs, down a long hall lined with the doors of each squad captain's office, and up another flight of stairs into a series of training gyms and work-out rooms. Another narrower flight of stairs took them to the flat roof, where a small mews staffed by two Intel agents housed the compound's messenger birds.

Then they were running down the stairs again, this time going one flight further down. They toured the locker rooms, surprised two agents in the showers, stumbled over a very young agent attempting to plant a home-made bomb in a clogged toilet. They'd receive their locker assignments with their squads, Yamanaka-taichou promised, and hurried them onwards.

Just down from the locker rooms, on the other side of the (ridiculously small) rec room, they found the reason for Yamanaka-taichou's hurry. The ANBU mess was serving up the last of lunch, and--contrary to all Yuugao's expectations about institutional food--it actually smelled good.

Touji abandoned her, then, in favor of stocking several trays with as much food as the impressed servers would give him. Yuugao took a serving of rice and a bowl of miso soup, and found a seat by herself at a small, circular table.

Hayate watched while the rookies got their noon meal, and gave Genta an encouraging salute when his friend went to sit with his new squad member. The other captains were coming in now too, to sit with their new recruits. Ryuuhei nodded at each of his captains as he made his way to sit with the two agents who were not assigned to squads.

Hayate carefully carried his tray one-handed over to the table Yuugao had chosen, and slid in across from her. He looked at the salt-grilled mackerel, pickles, salad, rice and bowl of soup on his own tray, then at her meagre lunch and smiled.

"You're going to need more than that, if you're going to get through this afternoon," he said. He broke his chopsticks apart by holding them stationary between his teeth, then held them awkwardly with his right hand and started picking at his fish.

_And you're going to need to eat better than that,_ Yuugao thought, eyeing his awkward handling of the chopsticks. But she didn't say it. She might have gently needled Izumo, or verbally sparred with Kotetsu, but she wasn't nearly comfortable enough with her new captain for that level of familiarity. Perhaps in time...

"Will this afternoon be as intense as this morning, then?" she asked, raising one delicate eyebrow and taking a mouthful of rice. Perhaps it wasn't as high in protein (or calories all together) as his lunch, but it had the added advantage of not being mackerel (too salty) or grilled eggplant (just...no.)

"You'll be meeting your squad mates, Tousaki Ryouma and Yamane Shou," Hayate said. "I thought we'd go over a training schedule, maybe have you guys spar a bit, since we won't be taking any missions for the next two weeks." He gave a little involuntary glance at his still-healing shoulder and dropped the bit of pickled daikon he had been picking up.

"Damn," he muttered under his breath, and retrieved the pickle. He glanced up at Yuugao to see what he was pretty sure was amusement in her eyes.

"I'm a lot better with a blade right-handed than I am chopsticks," he said, and gave her an embarrassed smile.

"I can bear witness of that," she assured him, smiling back. "It's my duty to defend my captain's honor now, isn't it?" Presumably against rather more serious threats than accusations of awkwardness, but it was a start. She'd have to work up to loyal lies about where exactly he'd been last Friday night...

And she really needed to stop thinking of what she would have said to Izumo or Kotetsu in these circumstances. Her twitching mouth was getting the better of her, and she hurriedly took a sip of her miso soup before she forgot herself entirely and laughed. Or, worse yet, told him what she was thinking.

"Well, I don't know about that," Hayate said with a small smile. "I hope I'll be the sort of captain whose honor is above question." He was about ready to give up on the fish, which stubbornly fell to pieces each time he tried to pick up a mouthful. "But if you want to defend me from looking like an idiot, remind me next time to eat something that takes less coordination."

"There's the soup," Yuugao pointed out, finishing off the last of her own. He was right; she was still a little hungry. She glanced up at the serving line again, thoughtfully. They probably saw enough injured agents in here that they kept at least a handful of utensils requiring a little less coordination. She could at least ask.

"Excuse me for a moment," she said, slipping out of her chair and heading back for the serving line. A few brief words, and she returned with a plate of sweet bean-paste buns and a fork. Wordlessly, she set the fork beside Hayate's place and took her own seat.

The buns were nearly as good as Izumo's, when he could be persuaded to make them. Anko would be _wild_ with jealousy.

Oh. A fork. How thoughtful. Hayate colored a delicate pink, glad that Hiroshi was busy with his own recruit, and Genta was off attempting to establish contact with Yonda. He glanced up to see Tenzou looking at him, though, with an amused smile. His huge Akimichi recruit had his back to them, at least, and Tenzou wasn't nearly the tease that some of the captains were. It was a small comfort.

"Thanks," he mumbled, and put the new utensil to use on the fish.

Yuugao's anko-filled bun suddenly turned stale and tasteless in her mouth. She swallowed carefully and set the rest of the bun down on her plate. Of course, she should have known he'd have his pride; she should have realized he hadn't been serious. She'd probably have been equally insulted, if he'd been the one to bring her aid unasked-for.

Apologies would only make things worse. Couldn't she manage _anything_ right? From breaking her new captain's shoulder to insulting him almost every time they spoke... It was _her_ fault, too, that they wouldn't be taking any missions for two weeks. What did her vaunted skill matter if she couldn't work with her new team?

And by the pace of the men eating around them--some of whom were going back for seconds--they had at least another ten minutes of this awkward, miserable silence. Perhaps failing the exams in the first place really would have been preferable.

Hayate couldn't fail to notice the way Yuugao stiffened up all of a sudden. She looked ill, almost; seriously unhappy and uncomfortable.

"Hey, it's no big deal," he said, and took another bite of the fish. "This is much easier. Should have thought of it myself, but... Well my mind was on other things."

He watched for a reaction, but saw only skepticism in her eyes.

"Yuugao," he said quietly, putting his fork down and meeting her dark gaze. "It's lunch. You helped me out. And honestly, it's okay to say, 'Hayate, you idiot, use a tool suited to the task and your abilities.' In fact, as my squad mate and subordinate, I'd say it's incumbent on you to say such things."

There was something about that quiet, steady face and those serious dark eyes that made it nearly impossible for Yuugao to angst brood any further. He shouldn't have been able to do that, just with an intent gaze and a gentle voice, but apparently no one have ever told that to Gekkou Hayate. Just as no one had ever told him not to pair that serious tone with such ridiculous words. He couldn't honestly expect her to say that, could he? He was probably just trying--

Someday, she might learn to stop herself from _thinking_ about things. Someday that wasn't a mission, at least. When there was an objective and an enemy, Yuugao had no problems at all. It was when no clear objective presented itself, and only friends--or at least comrades--stood near her, that she stumbled. Far better to take a kunai than to take the weight of someone else's disappointment, or her own. Gods, she hated feeling so insecure!

But where normally she would have drawn her walls around her and faced that crushing burden of failure on her own, somehow Gekkou-taichou's calm eyes undermined her walls and shifted away the burden. He was serious in what he said, no matter how absurd it sounded; serious about needing not his honor, but his dignity, defended.

Yuugao had dignity enough and to spare, but somehow even that thought could barely quell the incredible impulse to laugh. At him...and even more, at herself.

"Hai, Gekkou-taichou," she said at last, bending her head in submission--or in an attempt to hide the smile that wouldn't stop tugging rebelliously at her lips.

"Good," Hayate said, and where her smile was hidden, his was full and genuine. "As long as we have that straight, we'll get along just fine."

It was going to be an interesting challenge working with this woman. She seemed so delicately balanced. But she seemed to come out of her funk easily enough, and that was a good thing. Ryouma and Shou were good guys. They'd help her fit in, he trusted. And as eager to please as she seemed to be, they'd work it out.

He picked up his soup and drank quietly, still with a touch of amusement on his face. When they were both finished he gave her a quiet grin.

"Well, Uzuki Yuugao," he said, "ready to meet the rest of Squad Six?"

She nodded, and Hayate stood up, gesturing for her to do the same.

"Welcome to ANBU."

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Four_

_A cast list, for those struggling with the large numbers of characters we've introduced, can be found at:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com / 2063 . html _


	5. Meet the Team

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on out livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 5: Meet the Team**_

The schedule pinned up on the bulletin board outside Tsuchiya Ryuuhei's office had announced that squad captains and rookies would be busy until 1300, when the other members of their squads would be expected to meet (and welcome/haze/intimidate) the rookies. Ordinarily Tousaki Ryouma would have shown up five minutes late for a scheduled team meeting, with rumpled hair and a cocky grin just _daring_ Hayate to ask him where he'd been. But it wasn't every day you got a new rookie added to your team--and it certainly wasn't every day you got a girl.

So 1245 saw Ryouma sitting on the edge of Hayate's cluttered desk in Squad Six's tiny office, swinging one leg idly in the air and whistling a badly mangled version of "Kuroda Bushi." He'd picked up a bag of meat-buns on the way into HQ, and in between snatches of each verse he stopped for a bite or three. He was polishing off the second-to-last when the door's hinges squeaked, satisfyingly loud; Ryouma and Fukashi had once spent nearly a whole afternoon working on that squeak. Ryouma glanced over his shoulder, grinned, and threw the last meat-bun at the new arrival's head.

"You're _early_, Shou!"

Yamane Shou was, for reasons entirely different from Ryouma's, also habitually late. Usually because he'd been studying something or engaged in conversation, or just not able to tear his eyes away from that one last page of his manga before he had to leave. He was never _seriously_ late, but he was never completely on time, either. He snatched the nikuman out of the air and took a bite with practiced ease, and headed over for his own desk, casting his teammate a wary look.

"You'll get an earful from Hayate about the ass-prints you're leaving on his desk, Ryouma," he said, pulling a folder from his satchel and laying it open on one of the two desks across from Hayate's. He pulled a pair of copper-rimmed glasses out of his satchel next, and perched them on his nose--little oval lenses framing light brown eyes, under a close-cropped head of wavy brown hair. The combination of his round, reddish cheeks and the rounded reading lenses made Shou look even younger than his nineteen years.

If Shou looked younger than he really was, Ryouma could have passed for a man easily half a decade older than twenty-two (a fact he never failed to rub into Hayate's face whenever the squad commander got carded). Where Hayate was slender, Ryouma was sturdy; where Shou was round-faced, Ryouma was square-jawed, with high cheekbones and brown skin. He was also currently drumming his heels against the desk-leg and cramming down the last few bites of his meat-bun like a child ten years his junior.

"Kid needs something to complain about to make him happy," he mumbled indistinctly, and swallowed. "I aim to please."

With the last of the meat-buns gone, though--and not even any crumbs for Hayate to glare at later!--Ryouma flipped a kunai out of his holster and started carefully paring his nails.

A glance at the clock told Shou it was already 1252, and Hayate, unlike Ryouma and himself, was usually punctual. "He said he'd be here at 1300, right? With uh... the woman?" He bent his head back over his folder, appearing to be the picture of studious content, uncaring what the answer Ryouma might give would be. He wasn't apprehensive about this new teammate, not at all. She was just another shinobi, right? And he'd worked with plenty of kunoichi before he joined ANBU last year.

Ryouma grinned. So that was how it was? They hadn't talked much about the new recruit--Hayate hadn't even told them until a few days ago who it would be, and the slim file he'd handed them hadn't been terribly informative on anything but her physical strengths, weaknesses, and mission data. Ryouma could probably have squeezed more information out of one of his contacts in the records office, but why spoil the fun?

And why hold back on the fun _now_?

"Ooooh," he said, stretching out to ruffle Shou's hair--the office was small and cramped enough that he could just barely reach. "Is Shou-chan scared of the cooties?"

"No." Shou ducked irritably away from Ryouma's hand, raising his own to straighten his hair with a few hasty finger combs. It figured Ryouma would go for the most obnoxious angle on things he could take. He'd been waiting for this shoe to drop, really, from the moment they learned that their new teammate was to be the much talked about woman Hunter from the recent trials.

"I'm a medic, Ryou," Shou said, as if that were some kind of code word for 'above all your nonsense.' "I'm hardly afraid of girls." He pointedly turned a page in his folder, pretending to read, but the document about tropical diseases of the skin was hardly holding his attention.

Yeah, right. Ryouma's brows lifted in clear disdain for what Shou was pleased to call logic. What did being a medic have to do with being scared (or not) of girls? It wasn't like Shou was an gynecologist--he'd been working as an ANBU field-medic for the past nine months. And as everyone knew (Ryouma _had_ looked this up), there hadn't been a woman in the Hunters since Mito Izumi retired four years ago.

...Unless Shou was doing a little more than professional association with the middle-aged "girls" down in the ANBU infirmary, in which case, ewwww.

"So _girl_, maybe," he suggested, spinning his kunai idly around a finger. "You read her file, same as I did. What d'you think?"

"She's good. Got a good mission record," Shou answered, voice bland and detached. He stared unseeingly at his folder a moment longer. He could feel Ryouma's skepticism radiating like waves across the small office, and finally snapped the folder shut and looked up at his teammate.

"I don't exactly see why she wants in ANBU, though." Shou complained. "And to be a Hunter on top of it." Ryouma _was_ older and more experienced, for all he acted like a child sometimes. Maybe he'd have some insight here that Shou was lacking.

Sometimes Shou really was thick. Then again, the Yamane were one of Konoha's wealthiest families; Shou had defied his family's express wishes in joining ANBU, and after serving together for six months, Ryouma had few doubts about the other man's (occasionally well-concealed) idealism.

Ryouma was a war orphan, "brought up" by an alcoholic grandfather who could barely remember the boy's name on his good days. He'd never had any ideals at all. And, after a back-alley fight at nine years old when an eight-year-old girl had stomped his face in (she was Uchiha and already attending the Academy, but that was no excuse) he'd had no illusions about female weakness.

He didn't say any of that, though; it was all clear enough (except for the fight, which he'd never told _anyone_). Instead he said idly, "Same reason as the rest of us, probably. Needs the money." He flipped the kunai once more and slapped it down against his palm, shooting a quick sideways glance at Shou.

"You're hard up for cash? Lost it all on cards and women again?" Shou couldn't let the opportunity to get a dig in at Ryouma pass, and for once the man had left himself open. Of course Ryouma knew about Shou's heritage. With a name like Yamane, everyone just assumed you slept on eiderdown and dined on delicacies. But Ryouma knew the truth. Shou had been cut off. He lived on his ANBU paychecks just like everyone else. So Shou could afford to tease.

Besides, knowing Ryouma, he was probably right.

He pushed his glasses up his nose and grinned, knowing he'd scored a hit. "Some of us are here because we're devoted to our village and our Hokage, you know."

Idealism aside, that was a low blow. "Hey, I don't always lose!" Ryouma protested.

There wasn't much he could say about the women, though. Girls were cruel. He kind of liked them that way; it made it easier for him when things ended, as they always did. But it meant he spent an awful lot of his paycheck on the dark-eyed beauty of the moment, and a lot of his spare time picking up the pieces of the newest broken vase of apology-flowers after he'd ignored her for a full month during a mission he couldn't ever mention.

Shou laughed at his teammate. What was that they said about people who protested too much? He was pretty sure he knew exactly how much money Ryouma spent on his vices, simply because they spent so much time together as teammates it was impossible not to. Besides, if he remembered accurately, and he was sure he did, Ryouma still owed him fifty ryou from the last time he'd gone out card sharking with Hayate.

Shou, for his part, while he was willing to stake his friend, had more than a healthy enough sense of self-preservation not to even try to play at the level their captain did. The man was scary good at cards, just like he was scary good at swords.

"You only lose when Hayate's playing, right?" he asked, with eyes alight with mirth. "It's that whole brown-nosing thing you claim to not do?"

Riiiight. Ryouma was a good player--more than good, maybe; as a boy he'd paid for his Academy fees and food expenses by odd-jobbing and playing cards. Most people had assumed that an eleven-year-old barely knew the rules, and they hadn't bothered to wonder where he'd gotten the money for his stakes. He'd cheated, too, but only after he got good enough not to be caught at it. All's fair in war and cards, after all. But Hayate never needed to cheat--and even with cheating, Ryouma could very seldom beat him. He consoled himself that at least he always got the girls. It would've been more of a consolation if Hayate weren't so _superior_ about it.

So while Shou knew perfectly well that Ryouma never brown-nosed--and that he only kept playing and losing to Hayate because he couldn't give up on the idea that someday he might win--it was a convenient joke. Ryouma shrugged and grinned. "Gotta keep the captain happy. I'm not looking to dig the latrine pits every time we make camp for the rest of my time on this team."

Ahh latrines. It had been falling to the floaters on their team since Fukashi had died. Before that, well -- truthfully they'd all taken turns when necessary. Even Hayate lent a hand to the unpleasant work. But the lion's share of the hard work of setting up camp, including latrine digging, had fallen on Ryouma and Fukashi, and it undoubtedly would land squarely on Ryouma now.

"Unless this new girl is really gung ho about proving herself, I think that's gonna be you anyway," Shou said with a not terribly sympathetic laugh. "Won't be me, that's for sure." He held up his hands as if accepting surgical gloves. "I'm too important to waste on manual labor."

Ryouma grimaced. That was an old, old argument; Shou was certainly right about the importance of a medic's hands, but somehow Ryouma always lost his arguments about a ninjutsu user's hands being equally important. Perhaps more--most medical techniques didn't require that many seals, after all. It was true, though, that while Shou's hands were fine and long-fingered, perfect for surgery as well as seals, Ryouma's hands were blunt and scarred from years of alley-fights and training accidents. The calluses on his palms weren't as impressive as kenjutsu-expert Hayate's, but they were certainly no strangers to manual labor. Unfair as it was, he probably was stuck with the latrines.

...Although. Ryouma considered this for a moment, and then glanced at Shou in apparent dismay. "Hey, are we gonna have to dig _two_ latrines from now on?"

The superior smirk fell from Shou's face with an almost comic crumble as he took Ryouma's meaning. A woman might indeed demand separate facilities, even out in the woods. Who knew how prissy she would be?

"Oh man. I hope not," he groaned. "You really think Hayate'd tell us to? It would be so inefficient..." And humiliating. And a major pain in the ass. And just like some woman to demand it.

Shou really wasn't living up to his claim of not being afraid of girls. All right, so maybe it wasn't the girl herself, but it was certainly all that attended her. Ryouma was pretty certain that Shou had never actually even actually flirted with a girl, let alone kissed one; his miserable failure with the hooker Ryouma and Fukashi had hired for him was enough to prove that. (Who was nervous of a _whore_?) Come to think of it, probably the extent of Shou's experience with women was with his socialite mother and civilian sisters, who probably spent two hours picking out their kimono and kanzashi and the rest of the morning getting bundled into them. No wonder he was wary.

And of course, guessing this, Ryouma never thought of letting up. Instead, he pursued this line of thought with a growing grin and an evident glee at Shou's discomfort. "We'll take twice as long getting washed up, too, 'cause we'll have to go in shifts. And I bet she'll be hell in heels one week out of four..."

He was going to _enjoy_ this.

Well that at least was firm medical ground for Shou to stand on. He knew enough to know that Kunoichi bleeding in the field was something neither they nor their teammates wanted. Menstrual blood was just as scentable as an injury, if not more so, after all. No, this was one point he was confident about.

"She'll have to get an implant," he told Ryouma dismissively. "Most kunoichi already have them. It keeps them from cycling. Maybe two times a year, max." It kept them from getting pregnant, too, which was in many ways more important even than the not having periods was to a kunoichi. Still, those two weeks a year when they had their abbreviated little cleansings of the wombs...

"And she can take a medical for those two weeks. She'd better..."

"Y'know," Ryouma said conversationally, "you were doing pretty well up to that point. Nice medic-ly tone and all. But there--" he pointed at Shou with the tip of his kunai, grinning-- "you absolutely failed. Not scared of girls, my left foot. Admit it--the thought of a pissy kunoichi has you petrified."

"Scared is what keeps you alive in the field," Shou returned with the hint of a grin. He was quoting someone. Probably Hayate, actually, and countless legions of captains and squad leaders before him. But it was true. A shinobi who wasn't scared on the battlefield wasn't likely to be one who came back from it. And if that battlefield happened to be the one in the war between the sexes, well... He was gonna return alive, thank you very much.

Still, Shou was curious about what Ryouma, worldly man that he claimed to be, _really_ thought of this new addition to their team. They hadn't discussed it much, but surely Ryouma had a few opinions on the matter.

"So what do _you_ think of her, other than she's gonna make twice as much latrine digging work for us?" he asked, and leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him.

Ryouma glanced up at the clock on the wall. 1256. They still had a little time, probably, and if not... Well, what woman wouldn't be flattered to walk in on two guys discussing her in totally asexual terms? (That might change, of course, once they actually had an idea of what she looked like--but the file they'd seen hadn't had a picture, and Hayate had refused to tell.)

So he leaned back on the desk, one hand ruffling papers and shoving an empty curry bowl aside as he braced himself, and raised his other hand like a holy man delivering a homily. "Her mission record is outstanding, as you observed," he intoned gravely. "She's participated in a surprising number of A- and B-rank missions for a kunoichi of her age, and given her stated skills they're probably all combat missions."

Pause. A dropping of the hand, a slow grin. "And she broke Hayate's shoulder. I'm inclined to like her already."

Shou nodded seriously, with a look of grudging respect in his eyes. "She really did. Didn't just chip it a little, she seriously broke it. Nanao-sensei showed me the x-rays and told me to make sure he doesn't make it worse working out before it's healed." The medical charts he'd seen on their captain's clavicle fracture had looked bad. The kind of combat injury you expected someone to come back from a rough mission with, not a sparring injury. Hayate was damn lucky the nerves hadn't been damaged, considering he was a left-hander and it was the shoulder of his sword arm she'd broken with her well-placed kick.

"You think," Shou asked, looking just a little pale, "she's one of _those_ kinds of girls?"

...Oh, gods. This was almost as good as the time with the hooker, when Ryouma and Fukashi had watched--or, more frequently, howled with laughter--from the other side of the bar while Shou painfully tried to pick his way through a conversation with an annoyed whore who only wanted to get upstairs and get it over with. Poor, innocent little Shou. Ryouma might have almost felt bad about corrupting him, if he hadn't been certain that someone else would do it if he didn't. Better for it all to happen where Ryouma could keep an eye on him and intervene if anything went _too_ badly.

But he was freakin' amused now, and not making any effort to hide it. "One of those kinds of girls?" he repeated, snickering. "You mean, the ones who'll castrate a guy just for looking at 'em?"

He'd dated one or two of that type before. The rumors weren't true, but they weren't terribly far off, either.

"Yeah, or something like that," Shou agreed, nodding his head and ignoring Ryouma's mirth. Surely the other man could see what he was getting at here, and it was no laughing matter. Of course, most kunoichi were ball busters in their own special ways, but if this woman was gonna make a career out of it...

"I mean... She seriously broke his collarbone. Snapped it. And Hayate's slim, but it's not like he's any kind of weakling. I know Hayate's not the only captain who got hurt in the spars, but she broke Inoue's ribs in her spar with him, too." Maybe she _liked_ breaking men's bones. She wouldn't be the only borderline psychopath in ANBU, if that were the case.

"Well," Ryouma pointed out, "Hayate's still mostly whole." He paused a moment, and then added with all the concern he could muster, "Unless there's something in his last check-up you're not telling me about?"

Oh man, and there was no question what Ryouma was implying there. Shou gave Ryouma an incredulous look and an exasperated little tsk. "Would you get your mind out of the gutter for five seconds?"

"Kiddo, that's nowhere near the gutter!" Ryouma protested, all injured innocence. Shou looked skeptical. Ryouma lowered his voice and leaned in.

"Gutter," he whispered, in the voice of a twelve-year-old telling dirty stories to his teammates around the fire when they thought their sensei wasn't listening, "would be thinking about exactly how much fun we're gonna have with ANBU's only woman on our team."

"Fun icing the stumps where your testicles were attached, you mean?" Shou asked, leaning back away from his doubtless soon-to-be-emasculated teammate. He arched an eyebrow and mimed a kunai strike at Ryouma's crotch.

Ryouma dropped a protective hand instinctively, and then shot Shou a dirty look. "You're no fun."

"I'm just saying if she's like that, you're asking for trouble if you even think about crossing the line with her," Shou replied, leaning back with a self-satisfied look. Not that he'd ever really hurt his teammate, of course, but he'd made him jump. And maybe the big idiot would get it that they weren't talking about just any new teammate, or any woman. This Uzuki Yuugao person could end up being a disruption of the highest order, if they didn't play things very carefully.

"Hey, relax." Ryouma scowled briefly--it was supposed to be him teasing Shou, not the other way round!--but managed to regain a little of his equilibrium. He leaned forward, unusually serious. "She's gonna be a teammate. I can behave."

...Well, given how he and Fukashi had teased their other two teammates unmercifully since the day Fukashi joined Six Squad, one month after Ryouma did, perhaps 'behave' was relative. He'd tried to fill in the hole Fukashi's absence had left, but though Ryouma would never admit it, he was probably the one member of Six Squad who was most anxious for the floaters to end and for Fukashi's gap to finally be filled. Maybe it'd help him stop missing his friend.

He glanced up involuntarily at the scorched boar-mask hanging on the wall, but when his eyes slid back to Shou's face his gaze was paired with that old cocky grin. "Besides, maybe she's not like that," he suggested. "You never know. Hayate didn't seem too scared."

Shou's eyes followed Ryouma's gaze, flickering up to the mask and hastily away. It was easier to focus on the matter at hand. "Actually... yeah. Hayate was acting like it was no big deal. Well except it is a big deal. But not, you know, a big big deal," Shou said, worrying at his lip with his teeth, and looking for all the world like an anxious Academy brat faced with his first date.

Ryouma looked like he was about to pounce on the opening Shou had so clumsily left, so to deflect his teammate's inevitable teasing, Shou threw the question back at Ryouma. "Anyway, you still haven't really said what you think of her. You really think she'll be a good fit?"

The kid really _was_ worried, if he was pushing it this far. Ryouma gave the question his honest consideration, this time. "Solid skills," he said at last, with a shrug. And, after a moment's hesitation... "Going by her scores, she's better than Fukashi."

It felt a little like a betrayal. But the truth was plain; Fukashi had died because he hadn't been quite good enough, and none of the rest of them had been able to make up for his mistake.

"Maybe she'll last longer." For the team's sake, and his own, Ryouma desperately hoped so.

Shou almost flinched at the mention of their dead comrade's name. It took an act of will on his part _not_ to look up again at the burned mask Fukashi had worn. Not to let himself relive that horror of exposed vitals and torrents of blood. Not to remember the moment when Fukashi had dodged right into the path of the renegade Sunagakure ninja's wind jutsu and...

He blinked and looked at Ryouma with a grim expression. "Fukashi was good. He just caught a bad hit. I should have been able to save him." Staring at his hands, he knew they both knew it was a lie.

Yeah, Fukashi had been good--he'd always been able to kick Ryouma's ass when they sparred with straight taijutsu. But bad hit or not, the fact remained that Fukashi had had a split second to choose which direction to move, and he'd chosen wrong. Ryouma and Hayate had taken his killer down with a vengeance, but liquefying the renegade shinobi's insides hadn't done anything to help Fukashi. It hadn't even made Ryouma feel better. He'd thrown up afterwards, even before they went back to find Shou trying desperately to heal what couldn't be healed. Hayate hadn't said anything about it; that was the one moment of weakness about which he'd never tease.

Ryouma closed his eyes and leaned back. "He lost half his ribcage, Shou. You couldn't've saved him." The rest of it, _Neither could I,_ went unsaid. It was the only time Ryouma had ever wished his talents lay elsewhere than in viciously destructive ninjutsu.

"Yeah... Yeah, I know that, logically..." Shou knew it viscerally, in fact. The feeling of pouring his own chakra into Fukashi's lifeless body would never leave him. It came to him in dreams. It came to him when he worked a healing jutsu now, even for something minor. It came to him when he least could stand to have it near, and it came when he knew it would, when he passed the Hero's Monument, and couldn't help glancing at Fukashi's name, still sharp and new-looking, chiseled into the basalt.

He was silent a moment, listening to Ryouma's quiet breathing, to the tick of the clock on the wall, to his own heartbeat. Trying not to listen to his memories.

"It's too soon," he said simply, and curled up a little, hunching over his knees, staring at the floor between his feet. "Too soon."

Too soon for what? For Fukashi to die? He'd been twenty-four, older than Ryouma by two years, older than Shou by five. Twenty-four wasn't exactly young for a ninja, not when the average life expectancy was currently hovering around thirty-something. Still...death was always too soon. Fukashi hadn't been ready. Maybe Shou just wasn't ready to let go yet either.

Ryouma wasn't planning on letting go. But he wanted that hole in his life _gone_, and he wanted it gone for good. If this Uzuki girl could fill the empty spot on their team, and fill it well, he'd back her up against anything life or missions or enemies chose to throw at her.

He said flatly, "He died three months ago. You know how well the floaters _haven't_ been working for us, since then. Last time, that kid nearly got us all killed." Hayate had politely but firmly requested that the rookie never again be assigned to his team. Ryouma was just glad his captain's diplomacy had saved him the trouble of frying the kid's brain.

Ryouma was right. Shou knew he was right. That last mission had been scary in a way most missions weren't. In a way it wouldn't have been if they'd had a well-integrated and competent teammate. And whatever Shou's misgivings about Yuugao, her record spoke for itself. She was skilled. And he trusted Hayate. There was no way Hayate would have selected someone for their team who wasn't good. Not if he had any choice in the matter. And the rumor-mill being what it was, it had already come down through a couple of different channels and with a couple of different slants on the information that Hayate had advocated for this woman in the cut meetings the captains held after the trials. Even after she'd broken his collarbone.

"I know you're right, Ryou," he said slowly. He sat up, taking off his reading glasses and setting them atop the unread medical journal still sitting on his desk. With a slow, deliberate turn of the head, he looked up at Fukashi's scorched and scarred mask hanging over Hayate's desk. "I just... I never want to see yours there. Or Hayate's." Or mine.

And that, Ryouma decided, was quite enough of the angst. He could think and talk about Fukashi, who would probably be irritated if he knew it but at least couldn't come back to thwack Ryouma in the head. But worrying about deaths still in the future was just borrowing trouble, and a childhood in Konoha's slums had taught Ryouma that borrowing trouble usually just led to pain, and probably not getting anything to eat again that day. You lived life as it came to you; you took what you could get and tried your best to ignore what you couldn't, and whether you lived or died, you enjoyed yourself doing it. What else could you do?

So he shrugged and grinned, the old cocky grin suddenly a little more feral with a few more teeth. "Well, I'll make sure that if they do get me down, there's not enough of me or them to lug back!"

Shou could see what Ryouma was up to, but really he couldn't help but follow where his friend led. It was always Ryouma who pulled them up when things looked bad. He was muscle on the team in more ways than one, and looking at his grinning face, Shou couldn't have been gladder. Fate was an interesting mistress, throwing them together. Or luck. Whatever had led them to be teammates.

He laughed, a little forced, but could feel his tension melting. "You're such an optimist, Ryouma."

"Hey," Ryouma protested, still grinning, "I'm totally serious!"

Shou nodded soberly. "I know you are. You probably know some nasty jutsu that would disintegrate everything within a five meter radius."

Ryouma grinned wider--of course he did! No sense in being unprepared--and then cocked his head suddenly, to a sound he could barely hear. He started spinning the kunai around his finger again, deliberately not looking at the door. "Ready for the man-eater?"

"I guess so," Shou answered, looking at the clock on the wall and his watch in turn. They agreed: Hayate and their new teammate were six minutes overdue. "What's keeping them?"

The door-knob rattled, as it always did; Ryouma and Fukashi had worked to loosen that, too. Ryouma glanced over his shoulder, and sang out, "Nothing at all!"

Hayate stood in the hall outside his office door, sensing both Shou and Ryouma inside. He reached out to jiggle the doorknob, in case Shou wasn't paying attention. He had no doubt Ryouma knew they were there already. "Please use a chair, Ryouma," he called. He was almost completely certain the tall man's seat was planted firmly on the captain's desk. Probably sitting on one of his maps, just to annoy. But they had someone to impress today. Although that was also doubtlessly why Ryouma would make an extra effort to be obnoxious. Shou he was less certain of. The younger agent was quiet, had been fairly noncommittal when Hayate had broken the news about Yuugao's joining Squad Six.

He turned to Yuugao standing just back of his left side, and gave her a reassuring smile. "Ready to meet the guys?"

Her new captain was...talking to a closed door. Well, she'd been warned that the ANBU were quirky, to put it politely (or daft, to use Suzume-san's words). Yuugao glanced at Hayate, then again at the solid oak panel in front of them.

"Were you addressing me, taichou?"

"About asking you if you were ready, yes," Hayate said smoothly. "The comment about the chair was directed at Ryouma, who has an unfortunate inability to distinguish types of furniture." He pushed the door open, which true to Ryouma and Fukashi's design gave a groaning squeak, and gestured at the tall, dark-complected man sitting on the large desk on the office's right.

Shou stood up from his place at one of two desks on the left and laughed a little nervously, offering Yuugao a brief bow, and trying not to stare.

She was _pretty._

The tall man sitting on the desk didn't move, except to keep spinning a kunai around his index finger. He said cheerfully, "Takes too long to get out of a chair. Gotta be ready for action! See, if you'd been an intruder... I could've pushed Shou at you easier, from here."

Yuugao blinked. Ryouma was far enough away from the round-faced young man standing uncertainly in front of another desk that he'd have had to stretch--and probably jump off the desk altogether--in order to get any degree of force to his push. He was at entirely the wrong angle, too. She glanced a little uncertainly at Hayate. _Is he always like this?_ her eyes asked.

She hadn't exactly thought she'd meet up with another Kotetsu in ANBU.

"And how often have you, in your vast experience, had to confront intruders within a captain's office in ANBU HQ?" Hayate gave Ryouma a steady look, one underlain with both affection and outright menace. "Off my desk before I force you off."

Shou was in his way, intervening in the space between Hayate and Ryouma, in a heartbeat. "Nanao-sensei said no sparring for you until..."

Hayate raised his hand and cut him off, using a compelling, if quiet voice. "Yamane Shou, Tousaki Ryouma, this is our new squadmate Uzuki Yuugao, and even if you can't be bothered to show me respect any more, perhaps you could do so for our rookie? She does get a 24-hour hazing-free welcoming period, if I remember the rules correctly."

Ryouma slipped off the desk at last to sketch a rough but polite bow, as if that were his only reason for moving at all. When he straightened, though, he took half a step backward and collapsed onto the hideously yellow vinyl couch, slinging one arm along the back and leaning his head against the wall. "Course we wouldn't haze our new teammate, Hayate," he said lazily. "What d'you take us for?" He didn't seem to want an answer to that; he went on, as if savoring the thought, "We get to gang up on everyone _else_'s rookies."

His dark eyes flicked to Yuugao. "Good to meet the girl who took our captain down."

That, at least, was something Yuugao could latch onto. "I didn't take him down," she said, for what was beginning to feel like the five hundredth time. "He beat me."

Ryouma just waved one hand, narrowly missing scratching the couch with the kunai he still held. "Eh, details. _He's_ the one in the sling!" He grinned cheekily at his captain.

Kotetsu and Anko's lovechild, Yuugao decided, if they ever stopped snarking at each other long enough to have sex. The thought was briefly terrifying.

Hayate merely nodded. It was best, he'd discovered, to simply let Ryouma wind himself down, like a hyperactive child who'd been given one too many cookies. Besides, he was amusing. "Indeed," he said with a smile, patting his arm in its sling. "Which means you two will be doing the heavy lifting."

Before Ryouma could respond, Shou stepped back and stood at stiff attention. "Yamane Shou," he said, and gave Yuugao a much more formal bow. His deeply ingrained social training coming back to him, Hayate guessed. He could just see the younger ANBU dressed in a five-mon kimono, addressing some wealthy family acquaintence.

"Pleased to meet you, Uzuki-san," Shou said, straightening from his stiff-backed bow.

Hayate interrupted the courtesies. "She may be Uzuki-san when you see her in the street, but she's in uniform now," he said. It was an important point he wanted them all to get. "She's Yuugao."

Yuugao knew that the little chill that ran down her spine was stupid, and childish, and worse than childish--as if she were some silly girl thrilling to the sound of her lover's voice! But she couldn't help the feeling that this was the first step on her path to acceptance among her new comrades, and that she wasn't alone. Gekkou-taichou stood beside her, and while the young Yamane man seemed stiff with formality, Ryouma slipped his kunai into his holster and gave her another casual two-fingered wave from the couch. Yuugao bit back a smile and returned Shou's bow as best she could. "Shou-senpai and Ryouma-senpai," she said, studying their faces. In a month, she hoped, she would have memorized their smell, their steps, their voices, their movements; she would be able to pick each man out of a crowd or a dark room or a rainy forest. She would know their strengths and, more importantly, their weaknesses, and she'd be able to fit herself into their fighting dynamic as smoothly as if she'd always been there. "I hope to learn from your guidance, senpai."

Ryouma gave a decidedly unimpressed snort and demanded of Hayate, "You brainwashed her on the way here, didn't you?"

Hayate grinned, leaning back on his heels. "Only a little, Ryou. I didn't want her to hate you on sight, after all."

It was only a little effort to keep the banter going, effort Hayate was willing to make. He was determined not to act any differently with Yuugao than he would with any other new recruit. She'd fit in the quicker if the team dynamics were unchanged, after all. Or as unchanged as he could make them, given that they were slotting in a new person now, as a permanent replacement. He glanced at her, standing still beside him, taking it all in with alert eyes. What was she making of them? Of him?

Shou cut in again with a nervous little bob of the head. "Ah... uh... would you like to sit down Uzu- Yuugao-san?" he asked. He pushed a pile of Hayate's newspapers off the end of the couch that Ryouma wasn't occupying to make room for her, then stood attentively, as if he had pulled out a chair for her at a fancy table.

Yuugao wanted to fit in with her team almost more than--anything, but sitting on the couch next to one of her lounging new teammates was a bit too much. Especially given that both Hayate and Shou were still standing, Hayate casually and Shou uncomfortably. "I'm fine, thank you, Shou-senpai," Yuugao assured him. She did take another two steps further into the room, though, and leaned her hip against the near desk while she looked around. It wasn't exactly tidy; there were old tea-cups on the desks, scattered papers, abandoned bowls of take-out curry. Newspapers littered the floor now, and the scorched mask hanging on the wall looked as if it were collecting dust. It was also hanging slightly crooked. Yuugao wondered if anyone would object to her straightening up.

A movement caught her eye: Ryouma, who was trying very hard to snag Shou's attention. If he noticed her gaze, he didn't seem to mind. He mouthed dramatically, _Not castrated yet!_

...Perhaps her lip-reading wasn't up to par. That _couldn't_ be it.

Hayate almost laughed. Almost. "Alright, well... anyway, this is our office," he said, in a slightly cracked voice. Shou had blushed a delicate shade of pink, and was attempting to surreptitiously give Ryouma an ANBU hand signal meaning "keep quiet," but which Hayate was sure was more accurately read as "Shut up!"

"We plan our missions in here," he went on valiantly. "Do our paperwork here, sometimes eat and sleep here." He was sure she could tell that just from looking, really. I mean, why else would the office need a couch? "That's my desk," he continued, gesturing at the larger desk on the right that had formerly borne Ryouma's weight. "The other two are kind of communal property. We get our mission assignments delivered here, usually." He pointed at a relatively new-looking wooden box on his desk. It, unlike the rest of the clutter, was the one thing he was sure to keep well-organized. At the moment it was gratifyingly empty.

Judging by Shou's blush and the slight strain in Hayate's voice, Yuugao's lip-reading had been closer to the mark than she'd thought. Ryouma was smirking again, his arm draped along the back of the couch. Yuugao glanced away from the tiny drama to follow Hayate's explanation. Only two desks for the remaining three teammates; she wondered if they wrote their reports in shifts, or one of them used the couch. She would bet that if anyone lounged out to do his writing on the couch instead of tidily at his desk, it was Ryouma.

But the messiest desk was definitely their captain's. She couldn't imagine the state of the drawers. Hayate hadn't struck her as an untidy person--but then, he was a young man, and even Izumo was careless in every area but his kitchen. Yuugao refocused on the assignment box, the one starkly bare area of the desk. "How often do the mission assignments come? And what's the usual duration of the missions themselves?"

"A typical mission is six to ten days, including travel time, and I usually get at least a twelve-hour notice before we muster out. We usually get a seventy-two hour down period between missions, but they can last anywhere from half a day to a month, though usually not over that," Hayate answered, reaching over with his right hand to finger the empty box. "And as you can see we have no missions at the moment. Allows us to get you up to speed." He smiled what he hoped was a reassuring smile. So far Yuugao's questions had been astute, and the boys weren't behaving too badly.

Shou spoke up then, still looking a little apprehensive. "We um... sometimes camp, and sometimes we stay at an inn, depending on our cover and the mission and so forth."

"I'm the latrine-digger," Ryouma contributed, in a voice so bland that Yuugao gave him a sharp look. He met her eyes with a _take-pity-on-me!_ look, and the corners of her mouth twitched upward at last.

She said gently, "That's awfully brave of you to have taken that task on. It's one of the most important roles in the team."

Ryouma's piteous face split into a wide grin. "It's the hardest, too!" he confided, as if he were proud of it. "And even when my hands are _bleeding,_ Hayate won't let me stop..."

Poor Shou looked like he might die of mortification any moment. Hayate hoped he'd loosen up soon. Maybe if he led by example?

"Oh it's not that bad, is it Ryouma?" Hayate asked, giving Ryouma an amused look. "I let you eat any grubs you turn up, don't I?"

"That's all I get," Ryouma told Yuugao sadly. The man was capable of mood-swings faster than any PMSing kunoichi Yuugao had ever met. "You'd better keep an eye on your rations," he warned, "'cause Hayate here'll sneak 'em away when you're not looking."

Yuugao's tiny smile spread a little wider. "He certainly ate a lot at lunch. I'll keep your advice in mind, Ryouma-senpai."

Hayate cleared his throat, covering a sound that was suspiciously like a giggle. "Well I can see you two, at least, will get along well," he said and grinned, then walked over to Shou and patted him on the shoulder. "Cheer up, Shou, I won't let them pick on you." He continued into the room, squeezing past Ryouma sprawled on the couch, who only moved his long legs out of Hayate's way when Hayate pointedly kicked one of his feet. He pulled open one of the desk drawers and extracted a scroll, which he carefully unsealed and leaned across the desk to offer to Yuugao. "This is ANBU's current roll call. We usually operate as a unit and without support, but occasionally we take missions with other squads," he said.

Shou looked a little less tense, though he was still shooting the occasional disapproving look at Ryouma. Ryouma, for his part, looked happy as a clam.

Swallowing her smile, Yuugao took the scroll with a sharp nod and scanned it intently. Most of the names in the Hunter section were organized into squads of four, each identified with its number; there were twelve squads in all. Another 15 names were grouped together in an 'unassigned' pool; she guessed those were the floaters she'd heard mentioned. Two of the rookies had joined their ranks. A little further along, several dozen names were identified as T&I, and more were listed as medics and administrative personal. In all, she guessed there were over a hundred names on the roll. She didn't recognize more than a few of them, but she hadn't really expected to.

"You've been working with some of these unassigned agents recently, then?" she inquired. Her eyes flicked up to the mask on the wall, and then quickly down to the scroll again. The mask had hung there long enough to gather dust; how long had it been?

The glance was something Hayate couldn't miss. Nor could he miss the way Ryouma's eyes followed Yuugao's to stare at the mask, or the way Shou's face suddenly went blank and cold and still. Hayate's own breath caught for just a second on something rough in his throat, feeling Fukashi's ghost in the room with them. Well, it wasn't the first time he'd lost a teammate. Not the first time he'd lost a subordinate, either, though it was his first as an ANBU captain. It hadn't been easy for any of them. He supposed he should have considered that Yuugao's arrival would stir up Fukashi's ashes.

"We've been working with floaters for the last three months," Hayate said, looking at each team member individually, letting his eyes fall on Yuugao last. "And frankly that's not been great for us. We need a solid unit that knows each other's strengths and weaknesses." He paced in the space behind the desk, pausing in front of a wall-mounted weapons rack holding a trio of sheathed katana and short swords. "In fact, I think we ought to go do some training. We can do an indoor spar, or we can go out to one of the fields, but I think it's about time for you three to show off for each other."

Yuugao hadn't missed the change in her new teammates, either. Her fingers tightened on the scroll, until the thick paper crackled; she almost jumped. Very carefully, she rolled the scroll up again, smoothed the seal down with her thumb, and set it on Hayate's desk.

He was trying to distract them, she thought, to break the tension that her blunder had created. But while a little life crept back into Shou's face with their captain's words, it took Ryouma to crumple up the tension one-handed and toss it into the corner, as he inquired plaintively, "You're not gonna play with us, then?"

Before Hayate could answer, Shou was back solidly in his role as team medic. "Absolutely not! Not until your shoulder is healed," he barked, giving Hayate a look that almost made him shiver. The kid was definitely scary when he wanted to be. But he was also still a subordinate.

Hayate turned and gave him a slow, quiet look. "Did you get an earful from Nanao-sensei?" No doubt that was it, or Shou wouldn't be quite so alarmed.

Looking at Yuugao, Hayate continued, "Nanao-sensei is the medic I took you to after our spar the other day. She's... a little over protective."

"So I saw," Yuugao said dryly. She brushed her thigh with her fingertips, where liberal applications of ointment were helping the new scar to slowly fade. "I received quite the lecture when she stitched my thigh." She'd also learned that apparently breaking a man's shoulder isn't quite the way most girls express interest, but she wasn't going to repeat _that_. She'd blushed bright enough when Nanao-sensei had mentioned it, when she was having her stitches removed--and the medic, who was apparently a teenage girl at heart as well as a mother hen towards her patients, hadn't stopped teasing until Yuugao left. Yuugao was hoping it would be a long while before she needed to visit the medics again.

"Well, then!" Ryouma said, sitting up at last. "Hayate has to stay out of the fun. I say indoors. S'too hot outside, unless we're gonna practice water-walking."

"I think you're a little past the genin skills tests, Ryouma. Or at least I hope so," Hayate said, and turned to the wall-rack behind him. He carefully took down the mid-length katana, a beautifully balanced weapon, flexible and light, with an elegant cast-iron tsuba and a burnished lacquer sheath. He held the sword almost lovingly, cradling it against his sling-bound arm as he turned back to his team. It was easily his favorite weapon. "And I'm not completely sidelined, I could..." he started.

"Hayate!" Shou interrupted, sounding like a child begging for a favor. "Please, _please_ please don't." He walked across the room, stepping over Ryouma's legs, which had once again stretched out to fill the small passageway between the edge of the couch and Hayate's desk, and put his hands on Hayate's shoulder, gently manipulating the healing fracture. "It's not completely stable yet. You could be looking at serious nerve damage and..."

Hayate winced and gave Shou a stern look. Not only did whatever Shou had just done when he put hands on hurt, but he really didn't need the other man making mountains out of molehills in front of Yuugao. "And you don't want to answer to Nanao-sensei for letting me make it worse," he said, as light-heartedly as he could manage. He turned to give Yuugao a smile, hoping she'd not taken too much alarm from Shou's concern. "Don't let this worry you, you'll get the hang of it soon enough," he told her.

That smile didn't cut it. Yuugao gnawed her lip, looking pale and unhappy with distress again. She'd seen Hayate's wince as Shou touched the injured shoulder; she'd seen his clumsiness at lunch, and she saw the obvious love in his hands as he held his sword now. She'd taken that from him, that grace and that speed and that soaring steely beauty--and for what? For her pride? She'd meant to incapacitate him, but not nearly that much...

"I'm sorry, Gekkou-taichou," she murmured, locking her eyes onto the sword cradled in his sling. "I didn't know--I didn't meant for it to be that bad. I thought..."

She'd thought she could wipe away a superior smirk that she'd only imagined. She'd thought she'd been pulling her blow enough to crack, not to break.

She'd thought wrong.

Ryouma made some kind of face at Shou, who evidently didn't get it, for he cast a bewildered look of noncomprehension back at his teammate. He did back off, though, for which Hayate was glad. It was obvious the whole thing was not sitting well with Yuugao. He supposed he could see why. If he'd been assigned to the team of the captain he'd fought when he was a rookie, he'd have been pretty uncomfortable, too. As it was he'd avoided Tobitake Tekkai for a month, ducking into empty offices when he passed the man limping around ANBU's halls, despite both Tekkai and Ryuuhei's explicit assurances that it was a _good_ thing he'd taken that chunk out of Tekkai-taichou's calf with his sword.

"It's fine, Yuugao," he said, shifting the katana so it rested more comfortably in the crook of his arm. "I'm off missions another couple of weeks. And getting some chakra healing done on it in the meantime." Every day at 1700, to be exact. It was chakra healing and physical therapy, and as much as a pain in the ass as it was, it was also clearly doing a lot of good. Washing his own hair, for example, had been nearly impossible in the first few days, but now it just made him a little sore.

"Please don't worry any further about it," he said, looking right at his rookie recruit. "I told you you got in because you went all out."

"I think I could have gone all out without putting you out of commission for a month," Yuugao said wretchedly.

"Hey," Ryouma broke in loudly, "he said don't worry about it!" He climbed to his feet at last, challenging with more than just words. Somehow not even the height and the muscle and the spiky black hair could make him look menacing, though; perhaps it was the lazy grin that flickered onto his lean, angular face again. "And besides, this gives us time to laze around and laugh at him. We're fine with it anytime you want to break more of his bones..."

Shou gave Ryouma a sharp look. "How about not," he said, with finality, and turned his stern gaze on his captain. It was interesting just how much presence Shou could have, Hayate thought, when he was sure of his subject.

"Alright, alright, I won't spar today. But I'm still supervising," Hayate said, standing up straight. Being shorter than two of this three subordinates was a bit annoying, but then Genta was shorter than even Yuugao, and certainly shorter than his squadmates, and he managed to command his team with ease. Sometimes, Hayate thought, he really wondered if he actually had the kind of natural leadership ability his friend and fellow captain did.

Well, it didn't ever do to show waffling to your team, though. "Come on, all three of you," he said. "Yuugao, do you have the equipment you need?"

She _could_ do this, she told herself, and pride stiffened her back and put a new crispness into her voice. "I've got kunai and shuriken-set, basic gear. I don't use much beyond that." It was her own weaponry, though she'd left her clothing with the quartermaster to be measured for more exactly-fitting uniforms. She hadn't had any weapons issued yet, which wasn't a problem; she trusted her own kunai and shuriken more, and she barely even knew how to hold the katana all ANBU were apparently expected to use.

With a captain like Hayate, she could already bet that she would _really_ have to work on that. She had no hope of making it up to his level--even his one-handed and broken-shouldered level--but with practice and perhaps a few pointers, she might be at least competent by the time Hayate was ready to take missions. That wasn't much of a bright spot, but at least it was something to focus on.

Hayate walked briskly to the door, stepping around Shou and Ryouma, and stood in the doorway, still carrying his katana. "Alright then, Shou, Ryouma, shall we show our rookie how it's done in Squad Six?"

Ryouma just grinned one of those cat-who-licked-the-butter grins, but Shou looked pointedly at Hayate's sword, then up at Hayate. "Gekkou-taichou..." he said. Oh he was going to make a formidable parent someday, Hayate could see that at a glance.

"Ahhh..." Hayate said, and looked down at his katana, then up at Yuugao. "You've seen we're fairly informal within our squad. If he's using the formal address, I guess I must obey," he said with a little remorseful laugh, and went to put the katana carefully back with its mates on the wall rack.

They were trying so hard to put her at her ease--or at least Ryouma and Hayate were; she still wasn't sure what to make of Shou--that Yuugao couldn't help but unbend a little in turn. She wasn't sure if Hayate's last comment was a hint or not, but she was fairly sure that at the least it was meant to be a joke. Tentatively, she asked, "If I call you Gekkou-taichou all the time, then, does that mean that you'll obey?"

He might not obey, but Ryouma certainly would and did go bright red and convulsive with very badly-suppressed laughter.

Hayate also turned a bright red. He could feel the blush rising up his face almost to the roots of his hair. Curse his fair skin, he thought. But it _was_ funny. A sound escaped him that was nearly a giggle. And it looked like maybe Yuugao would fit right in. "Only if you are also my medic," he said in an oddly low mumble.

Shou couldn't quite believe his ears. He stared open mouthed at the red-faced lunatics around him, and blushed a deep red as well. His ears stood out like hot little red flags alerting all to his embarrassment.

It really was a good thing all the ANBU wore masks on missions, or else their team could probably start a forest-fire just by the heat of their blushing. Yuugao could feel the burning rising in her cheeks in response--but even worse, she _knew_ that if she looked at Hayate-taichou any longer, she wouldn't be able to contain her laughter. (Was that a _giggle_ she'd just heard?) She crossed her arms over her chest and looked determinedly at the door instead. "That's reassuring. I won't need to worry about changing forms of address."

Ryouma had given up on suppressing his laughter by this point. He clearly hadn't had such an entertaining afternoon in far too long. Wiping his eyes, he suggested, "Well, you could always ask Shou to teach you some medic jutsu..."

One look at Shou was enough to send him doubled-up in paroxysms of laughter again.

Shou turned an even deeper shade of red, glancing at Yuugao and stuttering, "I uh... I..." He turned desperate eyes on his captain then.

"Enough," Hayate said, rescuing him. He choked back another giggle with a little snort, covered it with a cough, and held the door open. "Let's go, please," he said, and leaned against the door, gesturing for the team to exit, and still red as a beet.

Shou, who was only too glad to get out of there, scurried out the door as fast as a little mouse.

This was probably the first time Yuugao had ever been with another person as easily-embarrassed as she was--let alone two!--and she wasn't sure whether to feel relieved at the common ground or horrified at the prospect of death-by-blush. She was fairly certain that Ryouma was going to get the time of his life from watching them...

...And she was beginning to think she might, rather less obtrusively, enjoy herself too.

Still, as she ducked her head to Hayate and stepped through the open door into the hall, she managed to avoid meeting Ryouma's eye.

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Five_

_A cast list, for those struggling with the large numbers of characters we've introduced, can be found at:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com / 2063 . html _


	6. Save the Day

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on out livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 6: Save the Day**_

From the start, Yuugao's first real mission with Squad Six had its problems. They'd been together for two months by now, far longer than most normal cobbled-together teams had before they started a mission. But though they'd trained together nearly every day of those two months, there were still a few hitches to their rhythm, a few anxious glances or dropped cues, that told of a shaky bond of trust and a team that hadn't yet quite come together into one smoothly functioning machine. It wasn't much; Yuugao doubted any outsider would have noticed it.

They all knew it, though, and the knowledge put the faintest edge into their eyes and voices as they laid their plans. The company of bandits they'd been hired to remove had successfully terrorized a mountain pass for months, and the rumors of support from an important Fire Country lord made it imperative that the bandits "disappear" without a trace. Hayate had saved final planning until they viewed the terrain. Now, leaning over the railings of a narrow stone bridge that arched over a lazy river cutting through a canyon, they discussed their options.

"We could just ambush 'em here," Ryouma suggested, tossing a rock meditatively in one hand. "Shou lures 'em out with a genjutsu or something, and we get 'em all on the bridge and collapse it beneath 'em."

"You couldn't be sure that would take them all out," Yuugao objected. "And we can't risk any of them getting away. We'll have to take them out one by one. The genjutsu is a good idea, though."

Ryouma tossed his rock once more, caught it, and flipped it into the waters below. "Okay, so Shou pulls his genjutsu and the rest of us pick 'em off as they come down. How 'bout it, Shou?"

Hayate nodded, scanning the layout of the land. "This is a good choke point," he said, and pointed to the narrow bridge. "If you give us a good lure, Shou, say some kind of broken down merchant's caravan in the middle of the bridge, then we could set ourselves at either end of it and pick off the bandits one by one as they come. It's a narrow enough approach to the bridge, and a narrow enough bridge, that I think we'd be in good shape."

Shou's masked face followed Hayate's hands as he pointed out the attack points, and he nodded slowly. "I can do that," he said. "Maybe cast something in there that will make the bandits think they hear one of their comrades calling them. But..." He glanced at Yuugao, then Ryouma and back to Hayate. "I'll need a guard. It's a complicated genjutsu, and you won't want me breaking it to fight."

That made sense. Hayate considered his personnel. Really, the best ones for the job of picking off the bandits were himself and Ryouma. Which left Yuugao to guard Shou. But the place where the team held together the weakest was between those two. Shou's trust was lacking. Yuugao was the most awkward with him. Hayate didn't take long to come to a decision, though.

"Yuugao, you go with Shou as his guard. You'll be down there." He pointed to a clump of scrubby brush at the base of one of the bridge supports. "Ryouma, you take the south end of the bridge; I'll take north."

Shou tilted his head in acquiescence. "Alright," he said, and looked at Yuugao. "Are you comfortable with that?"

Yuugao's lips tightened, just a little, but it wasn't visible under her mask. It made sense, really. She'd seen a few of Ryouma's viciously destructive ninjutsu in action, and she knew that Hayate's sword was undoubtedly more efficient than her fists and feet. Still... _Guard duty?_

It's a vital job, she told herself sternly, trying to ignore the faint doubt in Shou's voice, the question that seemed to admit his lack of complete comfort even as it inquired about her own. _Shou has to be kept safe, and I'm the best one for the job._ Even if--especially if--it wasn't necessary. At least Hayate and Ryouma's skills could be put to good use.

"I'm fine with it," she said shortly, tugging at a loosening strap on her left arm guard. "Anything else, taichou?"

"Give us a moment to get into place," Hayate said, and reached a hand back to unfasten the catch holding his katana in its sheath. "Then go ahead and pop up the illusion as soon as you're ready."

Shou nodded and started to move off.

"If you get into trouble, give us a signal, and we'll back you up best as we can."

"We'll be fine," Shou said, and squared his shoulders. "You'll let us know when you've finished them off, so I can drop it?"

"No," Hayate said and laughed. "I thought we'd just let you keep the jutsu up forever while we go off to enjoy the hot springs."

"Very funny," Shou sniffed.

Ryouma clapped Shou on the shoulder, hard enough to jostle his teammate, and chuckled. "I thought it was hilarious," he said cheerfully.

"We'll signal you as soon as we're sure there are no more to be lured out of hiding," Hayate said, and stood up straight. "Go." And then he was gone himself, reappearing moments later at the north end of the bridge.

"Right," Shou said and looked at Yuugao. "Time to get to work."

"Right," Yuugao echoed, a little dubiously. She sighed, watching Ryouma flash through practice seal sequences as he jogged off to the south end of the bridge, and then set her own hand on the railing of the bridge and leaped over it. A touch of chakra to her feet kept her from sinking into the gently-rolling river ten meters below, and she trotted to the scraggly brush at the north bank without even wetting her feet.

"How long will the genjutsu take to work?" she asked as Shou joined her there. Nervous energy kept her moving, pacing lightly over the uneven ground, taking a few half-dancing steps as if to meet and counter some imaginary opponent. The bank sloped steeply up to meet the canyon wall, and there was only a little open ground beneath the bridge before a rock spur ran out to block their view of the downstream bank. Up-river, they had a little more rocky shore-line, strewn with tumbled boulders, before a tangle of twisted trees and brush obscured their view in that direction as well. Not a very good position. She hoped Shou wouldn't need that guard, after all.

Shou glanced around for a good place to shelter himself, and frowned under his mask. They were open to ambush from both directions if they were found. Of course his job was to make sure they weren't found. He'd just have to trust Yuugao to deal with it if they were. His frown deepened.

"Once I cast it, it should be immediate. Unless you dispel it, you'll see it too, since it will be a wide area broadcast." He picked his way over to the stone feet of the bridge pier, and settled against it. At least there was something at his back.

"Is this going to be okay?" he asked her, meaning the position he was taking. "I'll start as soon as you say ready. Then we just have to wait for the quarry to take the bait."

Yuugao settled for a position on the slope of the bank, half-sitting and half-leaning against a large boulder. The bridge's span shaded them from the hot August sunlight, although the river's moisture made the air more muggy than cool. At least no one from above would be able to see them in the bridge's shadow, unless they were a good distance off and looking at exactly the right spot--and even then, hopefully Shou's genjutsu would disguise them. In any case, unless the river were going to surge up and swallow them, Shou had picked the best place he could.

"I'm ready," she said, twisting her torso in a loosening stretch. She worked her shoulders silently and waited for Shou's genjutsu to hit.

She almost didn't notice when it did. There was the tiniest surge of chakra, and then she heard Ryouma's voice calling, faint and far-away in words she could barely make out: "Come quick! We've got a real prize this time..."

Her muscles tensed in the very beginnings of movement, before she caught herself. "_Kai_," she whispered, pressing her chakra-bright fingers to her heart. The interruption of her own chakra dispelled the genjutsu's effects on her, and once more the river's lapping against the bridge pillars and the buzzing of the cicadas were the only sounds to disturb the bright afternoon. And then, far away, more voices calling--but these were real.

The genjutsu had two components: the auditory hallucination of a comrade calling, and the actual caravan on the bridge. It took all Shou's concentration. He had to cast a broad net, since they really didn't know how far away the targets were. And he had to make the illusion of the stalled caravan on the bridge as realistic as possible. He thought up details of caravans he'd escorted as a chuunin, of the wondrous riches of a Wind Country merchant's wagon he'd marvelled over as a child. Purple canvas drapery, gold trims and fittings. Sleek brown mules, with their long ears and bony withers, harnessed in red and black leather, with tassels and plumes. He imagined the fat merchant berating his driver over the broken wheel, the women and servants milling around in confusion. And then he carefully materialized that fantasy in the middle of the bridge.

He was still able to spare a little attention, though, to the surprised shout of a voice he didn't recognize, and the sound of something heavy falling to the ground. Hayate must have got one, he thought, and hoped Ryouma was having similar luck. Then he tuned it out completely. It was more than enough work to maintain the genjutsu without having to monitor his team as well. That was what Yuugao was there for.

Yuugao almost jumped again when she heard the running feet overhead, the shout cut short by the whisper of blade into flesh, and the thud as the body hit the bridge. A moment later, as she was gritting her teeth and forcing herself to relax against her boulder, the corners of her vision caught the flicker of sunlight as a corpse plunged into the bridge's shadow and then into the river. Water arched up, sparkling; a moment later the body bobbed to the surface, already half a meter downstream. Yuugao watched it float away out of the corner of her eye. "One down," she murmured to herself. Out of an estimated bandit troop of fifteen or twenty... This might take some time.

"Shou," she hissed, uncertain if he'd hear her. "Is the genjutsu showing them attacking?"

"Shouldn't," Shou answered in a distracted voice. He tried to keep his concentration steady and his chakra flow unaltered. It was hard to maintain the genjutsu and converse with his teammate at the same time, but if Yuugao was worried, he needed to know why. "Is something wrong?" he asked. He could feel the sweat trickling down his face under the mask, and tried to even out his breathing.

Another body fell to the rocks, this time only partly in the water. Then another from the other side. They were getting them. He just had to keep it up.

"If the bandits don't see their teammates attacking, won't they know something's wrong?" Yuugao asked. She licked her lips, folded her arms, unfolded them. Two bodies fell in quick succession from Ryouma's side of the bridge; she caught sight of one of them as it floated downstream, half-melted. Ryouma's worst ninjutsu built upon the combination of his elemental natures of Fire and Water, attacking his enemies' bodies themselves rather than just the ground or air around them. Even in their team training sessions, she'd never seen him use any of those ninjutsu before--and, she decided with a badly-suppressed shiver as she watched the bodies float away, she really didn't want to see them any closer.

"The bandits ought to see their own guys, just not ours," Shou said. "They'll see them fighting with the caravan's bodyguards." His voice shook, and he shifted his position a little, feeling the rough stone at his back scrape against his armor. "Is something the matter?" he asked again, sounding a little irked. "I need to concentrate on this."

"No," Yuugao said, watching the water where a still-thrashing body had just plunged, trailing entrails from a belly slashed open by Hayate's sword. When the man surfaced again, he was very, very still. That made six, out of...say twenty, to be safe. Where were the rest of them? They should have been attacking in a group, or as much of a group as they could manage if they'd split their forces upstream to attack from each side of the bridge. But while she could hear Ryouma's laughter and feel his chakra surges as he fought, Hayate's side of the bridge was momentarily still.

_Was_ something the matter? Shou had the genjutsu entirely in hand, it seemed, and yet something kept niggling at Yuugao. Maybe it was her narrowed field of sight, cut off by the rock at one end of their little river-bank hideaway and the thick tangle of brush at the other. Maybe it was her urgent desire to be doing something, as all of the men were. And maybe it was just the queasiness biding in her stomach as another body plunged into the water from Ryouma's end of the bridge, shedding half-rotted lumps as it fell.

If she watched the horrible fruits of their harvest anymore, she was going to be sick. Clenching her teeth, Yuugao shoved away from her walk and wandered a little upstream, keeping close to the rough wall of the cliff. She could still hear the sounds of fighting--Hayate had engaged another enemy, it seemed--but at least she didn't have to listen. If she got very close to the twisted trees, the cicadas even drowned out the clash of steel...

But they didn't quite drown out the sharp shout behind her. Yuugao whirled, just in time to see a ragged-looking band of men leap over the jutting boulder downstream and rush towards Shou. All of them were armed and murderous, and one of them wore a battered and abused hitai'ate, too scratched and dirty for her to even make out what village's sigil it bore.

That didn't matter, now; it didn't even matter that he must be at least a chuunin, to have recognized and broken the genjutsu on him and a handful of his fellows. What mattered was that they were bearing down on Shou--Shou, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground against the bridge's pillar, who _had_ to maintain that genjutsu if Ryouma and Hayate were to have any chance of completing their mission on the bridge above. Shou, who didn't dare break his hands from the seal to defend himself.

The first sword was slicing for Shou's neck when it met Yuugao's arm guard with a bone-rattling impact and a shower of ceramic chips. Then Yuugao's foot met the brigand's throat.

Shou flinched hard, then scrambled to his feet, pressing back against the stonework and watching with a racing heart as Yuugao fought off the attackers. There was a motley assortmant of weaponry, as befit a band of highwaymen. Katana, curving cutlasses from southern lands, a long blade on a pike that reminded Shou of a naginata, but for the elaborate scroll of the blade itself. Yuugao was still on her feet, but there were too many men for her to fight alone, and Shou didn't dare drop the jutsu. Not now. He jumped to avoid a sickle arcing towards his feet, and kicked up a cloud of gravel and dust, stopping one blade with the sole of his boot.

A hand connected then, driving a shorter blade along Shou's shoulder, and he spun away from it. "Dammit, get us some backup!" he shouted. His shoulder blazed and bled, but at least the dagger hadn't sunk in. A shallow slice was all he could afford to take.

Yuugao was already bleeding from a long cut along her shoulder-blade, a shorter gash over her collarbone; her arm ached badly where her arm guard had stopped the first sword, and she prayed she hadn't cracked the bone. But none of those hurt more than the sight of Shou's blood slipping down his arm, and not even _that_ hurt as much as her knowledge that Shou was right. They needed backup; she couldn't take all these men on her own. Three men at most, perhaps, but not six, not when she had Shou to protect and a rough, uneven terrain that threatened a wrenched ankle or worse at every step. She took down one man with a savage kick that echoed the one with which she'd broken Hayate's collarbone; but this one wasn't pulled at all, and a slicing chakra-laden wind followed the path of her kick. Her foot crunched through bone, and her chakra blazed through flesh. The man screamed and dropped.

He was only one out of six, not counting the man whose throat she'd crushed with her first kick. Three of the remaining men were coming in for her again, while another headed for Shou and the sixth man, the shinobi, stood back to begin a sequence of seals. His movements were far slower than any high-level Konoha shinobi, rusty with disuse; but they were fast enough that she had no doubt his jutsu would hit before she could defeat her three attackers and get to him.

_Shou's right_, she thought despairingly, and lashed out with a punch that carried biting wind in its wake. The brigands drew back just a little, laughing as her attack failed to do more than scratch their faces--but it accomplished her real intent. With a brief moment of breathing space, she threw back her head and cried, "_Taichou!_"

Hayate had been about to engage a short, barrel-chested bandit who was rushing down towards his "prize" when he heard Yuugao's desperate shout. He didn't stop his motion, though he took less care with his kill than he might have. His blade swung out of the shadow of Shou's illusion to sever the man's grimy, beard-stubbled head from his equally grimy body. Then he was at the side of the bridge, looking over, seeing Shou and Yuugao under attack.

"Ryouma, you take over here," he shouted, and didn't wait for acknowledgement. He was already over the side of the bridge, coming down on the man who was hanging back--the one who was undoubtedly a shinobi. As he fell he cast his jutsu, _Mikazuki no Mai_, and a whirlwind of Hayate clones materialized, blades flashing, voices crying, so that it seemed a whole host of swordsmen had descended upon the attackers.

The enemy ninja had been mid-seal, weaponless but for his marshalled chakra, which he turned in fright to unleash on Hayate. It was poorly coordinated, no doubt due to his sudden change of focus, and the shower of icy shards the man flung at Hayate did nothing to slow him down. The man was sliced into three pieces by Hayate's and his clones' blades before he had time to shout.

The icy little daggers the man had materialized shattered against Hayate's mask and armor. A few grazed the exposed skin of his shoulders, and one ran a long red furrow through his hair that hurt more from the impact than the slice. He spun away from the corpse and towards Yuugao and Shou, taking out two more of the attackers from behind before they had time to turn.

There was still a man aiming a blade for Shou, though, and Hayate wasn't quite close enough. "On your left!" he shouted to Yuugao, and his own blade clashed with the sword of the third man who'd been attacking her.

Yuugao didn't waste time on thanks; she'd wasted far too much already, in those brief heart-beats of frozen watching. Hayate's technique wasn't quite ninjutsu, not wholly kenjutsu; but whatever it was, it was just as destructive as Ryouma's flesh-eating ninjutsu. It was also agonizingly beautiful, in the silver sweep of swords, the spinning men so graceful they cut into her heart. If she closed her eyes, she didn't doubt she'd see the dance play out on the inside of her eyelids, falling, flying, following the cutting wind of sword-blades into a terrible kind of beauty.

But time wouldn't stop, even if she wished it to, and Shou was still in danger. Yuugao was just close enough that she could leap into the air, legs scissoring in a double-kick that caught the brigand's head briefly between her calves and broke his neck. She landed in a crouch, just beginning to pant. Her arm hurt, and her shoulder and collarbone; her shirt and vest beginning to stick to her chest with the messy bleeding of the flesh-wound. But her eyes returned to Hayate anyway, for just a brief moment before she could force herself to glance around and ensure all the bandits were dead.

The last bandit was a good swordsman, but he was no match for Hayate's speed and skill. His blade hissed against Hayate's, then both men sprang back. One in loose-fitting tan tunic and pants, the other in sleek bone and black armor. The expression on Hayate's mask was impassive as ever; the expression on the rogue swordsman's was pure terror. He swung wildly, Hayate evaded deftly, and then the man was falling, blood soiling his shirt with appalling speed. He gasped, groaned, and then was still.

Hayate dropped his own jutsu, so where there had been a confusing multitude of clones and translucent, ghostly images of Hayate, now there was just the man. He turned then, still moving with the exquisite speed the adrenaline of the fight brought. His longish hair flew out, and glittering drops of sweat and blood showered from it, spattering down across his mask and armor. "Are you alright?" he asked. "Yuugao? Shou?"

Shou was shaking, still holding the jutsu, and one whole arm was drenched in blood. Yuugao looked no better, bloodied and holding her arm. "How bad is it?"

She glanced guiltily at Shou before she answered with a brief, "I'm fine." She could still move her fingers normally, and though her arm ached beneath the chipped arm guard, it was the duller ache of a bad bruise rather than the sharper pain of a broken bone. Shou worried her more. The wound itself didn't look too bad, aside from all the blood, but he shouldn't have been hurt at all. Shouldn't even have been in any danger, if she'd been doing her job...

Hayate's jutsu was, for a moment, forgotten. Yuugao rose to her feet, moved the recent corpse out of the way with a heel and a well-concealed shudder, and knelt beside Shou to carefully check his sliced shoulder with the tips of her fingers. As she'd guessed, it wasn't too bad, but it was in an awkward spot and was bleeding badly. With bloody fingers, she pulled a wad of pre-cut bandages out of her belt-pouch and pressed it to his shoulder. Only then did she dare ask Hayate, in a voice too deliberately flat to be as casual as it sounded, "Was that the last of them?"

"Ryouma had one or two more to deal with, but I think that's it," Hayate answered. He shook the gore off his katana, wiped the blade down with a folded square of cloth, and resheathed it, then knelt next to Yuugao and Shou. "Hang in there, Shou, just a minute or two and you can drop the jutsu," he said.

Shou's reply was a barely perceptible nod of the head. He was shaking with effort, panting a little. But Hayate knew his squad well. Shou had hidden reserves of stamina to call upon. "As soon as Ryouma's done, we'll call this mission complete," he said. Even if one or two of the bandits escaped, they'd killed fourteen by his count. Sixteen when Ryouma dispatched the last two that had still been on the bridge. This band of thieves would not be harassing any more travellers.

Hayate looked closely at Yuugao's wounds now. The cut on her collarbone had already stopped bleeding, but the one along the edge of the armor in back was still oozing. He pressed a bandage against it and held it, while she attended to Shou's shoulder. "Are you hurt anywhere else? Either of you?"

Shou shook his head, again a barely perceptible movement. Not surprising given how hard he was concentrating.

Much as she would've liked to shrug off her injuries, Yuugao knew that in such instances toughness often meant stupidity, and that a hidden weakness could get one's team as well as oneself killed. "Bruised my arm, I think," she said, nodding down at her left arm-guard. The bandit's sword had dug a long divot out of the ceramic plate, and her arm throbbed steadily beneath it. Better that than Shou's head gone, though. Far better.

"It won't slow me down," she promised, and closed her eyes briefly, hoping they couldn't see the flicker of movement in the dark eye-sockets of her mask. She'd called on all her speed to interpose her body between Shou's and his attacker's sword, but what if she'd been a moment slower? A moment faster? What if she'd actually been attending to her duty, instead of allowing herself to be distracted? Would the blood that soaked slowly into their bandages now never have been spilled?

Would she have had to shame herself, admit her weakness, and call for help?

Her throat was still raw with the pride-searing agony of that cry. But deeply as she regretted her mistakes, she couldn't help but be grateful, in some small shameful part of herself, that she'd been privileged to see the dance of Hayate's sword.

"Not broken?" Hayate asked, and eyed the damaged arm guard. "It looks like you took a serious blow." She seemed strangely withdrawn, and he was concerned. It had been their first mission as a team after all. Her first mission as ANBU. He glanced up at the bridge, hearing no further sounds of combat from Ryouma. Was he finished? Looking at Shou, Hayate hoped so, for Shou's sake.

Shou was still, eyes unfocused behind his mask, holding his jutsu with all of his strength. By Hayate's estimate he'd probably be able to maintain it another half hour if he had to, but that would exhaust him to the point of collapse. Not an outcome Hayate wanted. Not at all.

He checked the bleeding under the bandage on Yuugao's shoulder, and was pleased to see it was nearly stopped. "I'll tape this," he said, and glanced up towards Ryouma's position once more.

Yuugao could hear Ryouma's footsteps on the bridge, his strides long and impatient; she wasn't surprised when they paused, switched direction, and thundered to the edge of the bridge. His voice called down, "Think that was the last--ah, hell, I'm not shouting."

A moment later he'd dropped over the edge of the bridge like the bodies he'd kicked through the railings, landing lightly on the surface of the water with his knees flexed and his mask shoved up to the side of his head, baring a bright unholy grin. "If we didn't get all of 'em, the rest aren't coming," he complained. His eyes skidded over the bodies and his teammates' wounds without a flicker. "You guys gonna patch up before we move out?"

"Drop the jutsu, Shou," Hayate said and put a hand out to steady the other man should he falter.

Shou let out an exhausted sigh, sagged a little, then shoved his mask up and scanned over his team. "I'll patch..."

"No you won't," Hayate interrupted. "You recover. No one is seriously hurt, I don't think. Let Yuugao finish taping your shoulder." He reached a gloved hand up to push his own mask off, and winced when it raked over his cut scalp. A little rivulet of blood cascaded down his hair and into his eyes, and Hayate frowned and smeared it across his forehead.

She couldn't quite help the flicker of a worried glance when Hayate pushed his mask back and the blood ran into his eyes, but he looked mostly unharmed beyond a few more scrapes in his bare shoulders, and she knew from long experience that head-wounds always looked worse than they really were. He'd be fine. They'd all be fine. Shou was even responding now, wincing as she pulled the wad of soaked bandages away from his shoulder and dabbed gently at the clotting wound. But he kept still when she smeared antibiotic cream over his shoulder and taped the lips of the wound shut, just as Hayate had done to her a moment ago.

Hayate himself was crouching next to her now, watching Shou with the oddest expression, a mixture of concern, weariness, and adrenaline-driven alertness. He was still catching his breath, wiping occasionally at the blood that trickled into his eyes. He didn't look at her; nothing about him seemed to direct any blame, any disgust at her inability to complete the one (simple?) task she'd been given. But then, perhaps that was why he wasn't looking at her.

Yuugao sighed and smoothed the bandage across Shou's shoulder. "That should do it," she said, rocking back on her heels. At long last, she let herself loosen the straps of her arm guard and drop the damaged piece of equipment to the ground. She peeled her long black glove down to her wrist and grimaced at the dark bruise already beginning to rise on her forearm.

As a reminder, it would be a fairly good one.

"Are you sure that's not broken?" Hayate asked, and reached out a hand to Yuugao. "Let me feel it."

"If it's broken," Shou said, looking up, "it's because she stopped a blade that would have severed my head from my neck with it." He pushed his mask off his face now and looked at Yuugao a little shyly. "So, uh, thanks."

Hayate nodded. "Good work, both of you," he said. "Sorry I didn't get here a little sooner." He glanced at the corpse of the ninja he'd dispatched, wiped his face again, and turned to Ryouma. "You're in good shape, right? Go see what our man over there was wearing for a hitai-ate. He used an ice jutsu on me." Then he reached for Yuugao's arm again. "Come on, let me take a look."

"It's fine," Yuugao protested, cradling her arm against her chest with a glare that dared him to even think about pulling it away. "It's just bruised." And throbbing worse than before, now that she'd pulled the supportive guard and glove away from it, but she'd dealt with enough broken limbs--both hers and others--in the past to know that it definitely wasn't broken. Cracked, perhaps, but it could heal on its own in that case. And though she really had needed the gash on her shoulder blade tended, to let her captain handle her arm would be just another step along the path she'd already taken, of admitting she couldn't handle her responsibilities by herself.

To Shou she added, in a low voice, "I'm sorry I didn't get there sooner."

Hayate's own expression darkened, and his voice took on a hard edge. "Yuugao. You are my squadmate and my subordinate. And you are injured. Now either let me see your arm or..."

He didn't finish what he was going to threaten her with, in part because he wasn't sure himself. His head ached, and there was still an annoying trickle of blood dripping through his hair, and if Yuugao was injured, it needed seeing to. That's where his focus was, and the remaining adrenaline from the fight went directly into his sense of urgency now.

"I'll check it over," Shou interrupted. "Please, Yuugao." You could almost hear the san he still had to make an effort not to use with her name. "And do something about your head please, Hayate. I think that's your own blood you keep wiping away."

Hayate let out an exasperated little sigh and pulled his mask off all the way, putting a hand to the top of his head where his scalp was indeed sliced neatly open. "Well hell," he muttered, and gave Yuugao a sheepish look. "Alright, let Shou examine it in his capacity as medic, please."

That was reasonable, at least. Shou was their medic, and she'd saved his life; she believed firmly in the repayment of debts. She would have liked to give Hayate one last scowl before she turned to Shou, but there was something disarming about the slightly abashed look on his face, the sternness replaced by sheepishness as he tried discreetly to wipe his bloody hand on his trouser leg. How could he be both the avenging angel she'd witnessed a few bare minutes ago, and this ordinary young man?

How could he so easily remove his masks, when she never could?

Yuugao sighed, proffered her bruised left arm to Shou, and shoved her mask to the side of her head with her right hand. It didn't seem to make a difference. She still felt ashamed of her weakness, bruised in her pride more deeply than in her flesh, and--more shameful still--unable to regret what she'd witnessed.

If they had to be rescued, at least it was by a man she could admire.

Ryouma's return was a rescue of an altogether different sort, and she managed to shove away her thoughts as he came trotting back with the battered hitai'ate dangling from his hand. "Kirigakure no Sato," he said, tossing the abused steel plate on its ragged bandanna to Hayate. "Didn't recognize him from the Bingo Book, so he's probably some low-level nobody's bothered tangling with." He aimed a kick at a corpse sprawled on the ground, the man whose neck Yuugao had broken. "D'you want me to melt these guys, or should we just toss 'em in the river with the rest?"

Hayate gave the scattered corpses a frown. "The river really doesn't move fast enough here. I suppose we ought to clean up after ourselves enough that we don't end up sending disease downstream to whoever drinks the water." He frowned more deeply and rubbed another trickle of blood across his forehead. "But we want to leave enough of a sign that they're dead and gone so that any of their buddies who escaped will get the idea they don't want to come back."

Shou, who was still inspecting Yuugao's arm, said without looking up, "Decompose a few, bury a few. Leave the blood where it is."

Hayate nodded. "That sounds like a decent plan." He put a hand up to his head and felt a goose-egg forming where the ice-shard had struck. His gloved fingers came away stickier and he made a face.

"Put a bandage on it, Hayate," Shou said, and looked up at Yuugao. "You're right, it's just a bruise. We were both lucky." Shou's face colored slightly and he ducked his head. "Thanks, Yuugao."  
None of them had missed the face Hayate made; but while Shou gave orders for a bandage and Yuugao looked discreetly away, Ryouma dug in his belt pouch, tossed a square of folded bandages to Hayate, and sneered. "Mop it up and stop being such a wimp, Hayate. You're not impressing anyone with all the bloody hero stuff."

Yuugao opened her mouth indignantly and shut it again a little too fast. She wasn't sure if Shou had seen her, wasn't sure what he'd make of it if he had. Wasn't sure what _she_ made of it. She dropped her gaze to the rocky ground--and then glanced up again at Shou, trying a small smile. If she couldn't explain it, perhaps it was best to ignore it. "I'm glad I could be there, Shou. Thank you for what you did, as well."

"And Hayate and me just lollygagged around on top of the bridge, eh?" Ryouma asked without real heat. He flexed his hands, crouched down next to the last man Yuugao had killed, and started the seals.

Yuugao looked quickly away.

Hayate pressed the bandage Ryouma had given him to the top of his head and watched as the jutsu took effect. It was a foul process, softening and rotting the flesh right off the bones, and it didn't surprise him when Yuugao chose to look away. Ryouma had tried to explain it once, an acceleration of decomposition by increasing heat and drawing moisture out of the body's cells. Shou had gotten the gist immediately, likening it to some medical techniques he used. Hayate was happy to leave his knowledge of the process entirely theoretical.

He studied the Kirigakure bandanna a moment, then looked up at Shou and Yuugao. "So what happened? I'm guessing our friend from Mist there is the one who broke the genjutsu and targeted you?"

"They came from behind that rock," Shou said and pointed. "Yuugao was patroling the other direction. We had a shitty position, blind on both sides, and she couldn't be both places at once. But she still managed to get between me and the attackers before I would have been forced to drop the jutsu." He stood and put his hands on his captain's shoulders. "Kneel, I want to look at your head now."

Hayate did as Shou bade, kneeling and letting the medic examine the cut on his scalp. "Yuugao?" he asked, letting Shou work. "That sound about what you think happened, too?"

"Just about." Yuugao was still studying the chisel-marks on the rough granite blocks that made up the bridge's pillars; the hum of chakra, the violent stench of rotting meat, and the whisper of decaying flesh sloughing away from crumbling bones made her quite certain that she didn't want to look around just yet. She told the pillar, "I was almost at the trees, and the cicadas were loud enough that I didn't hear their approach. Just the shout." Her lips thinned. "If I'd been more attentive--closer to Shou--I would have had the advantage over them. They couldn't come around the rock all at once."

"Hindsight is twenty-twenty," Hayate said. "If you'd been on the other side and they'd come from the west instead, you'd have been even more vulnerable." He frowned and winced when Shou opened a small antiseptic wipe and sponged at the cut.

"Hold still. You need a stitch in this," Shou said, getting out a pre-threaded needle.

Hayate gave Yuugao a long-suffering look. "Fine, fine, I'm holding still. I told you Shou was a pain when he's in medic mode, didn't I?" He didn't wait for an answer. "From what I can see, you were doing the best you could with bad terrain. Yuugao was patroling the bank with the greater number of places of potential concealment. Shou had a clear view of the direction the attackers came from. And he called the alarm in time to get you over to him so he didn't have to break the jutsu. It was good work. You did well." He still looked unhappy. "I should have scouted the area below here better. And we weren't anticipating a ninja amongst our enemies. That's an Intel failure."

Yuugao sighed. "Yes, sir." Her fingers returned probingly to the painful bruise on her arm; yes, it still hurt. She winced and dropped her hand to her knees.

"Done!" Ryouma said cheerfully, and gravel crackled as he rose to his feet. The smell was already dissipating, drawn away on the river's breeze. When Yuugao dared to glance around, Ryouma was kicking sand and pebbles over a long, low line of what looked like rich black earth. He caught her eye and nodded down at what remained. "Mostly organic compounds. The weeds'll grow well here for a while."

"Ugh," Yuugao said, faintly. Ryouma grinned and wandered off to the next body.

When Shou finished stitching Hayate's scalp and had pronounced him good to go, Hayate stood, pulled a candy bar from his pouch and handed it to the medic. "Here, eat this. You worked hard. We won't be leaving until Ryouma's ready, so you should rest up."

"We all worked hard, Hayate," Shou protested, but Hayate was already moving towards Yuugao.

"Walk upstream with me a minute and show me how far you were when you heard the enemy," Hayate said, and he produced a second candy bar and held it out to her. "It's not much of a bonus for your first successful ANBU mission, I'm afraid, but it's all I've got to hand." He smiled at her, hoping she'd lighten up a little. She looked far too downcast, and he knew from his two months' work with her that she tended to take little lapses in perfection as serious failures. "You did good work. I put you in a bad position, I'm afraid."

"It wasn't any worse than anyone else's!" Yuugao protested, but she took the candy bar anyway. Her ungloved hand fisted around the wrapped bar. This was the hard part.

"I'm--sorry I had to call on you," she said, skirting a large boulder without really seeing it. "I should have been able to handle the situation on my own--to make enough of a breathing space to use a jutsu, at least." Even _Ko-shuurai no jutsu_, the little balls of lightning, would have taken out several of the enemy if she'd stopped to use it. But if she'd stopped, Shou might be dead.

They were almost at the line of brush and twisted trees; she stopped, nodded to the ground where her turning feet had kicked little gouges in the sandy shore. "I was standing here when I heard them." The candy bar was squelching in her grip; she relaxed her fingers and tried to smile. "I might've moved almost as fast as you, getting back to Shou."

And that brought up more thoughts, a little less painful. Driven to honesty, Yuugao added, "Your jutsu was very impressive." She couldn't quite meet his eyes at that, and ripped open the candy bar wrapper instead. Chocolate, half-melted by the warmth of the day and her hand. She broke off half and offered the rest back to Hayate.

Hayate accepted the chocolate with a smile. "It's really yours, you know," he said. "You earned it. But I won't turn down chocolate with peanuts if it's offered." He bit into the bar and crunched the peanuts, enjoying the flavor and the sugar. The distance they'd covered was impressive: Yuugao must indeed have used speed that would rival his own.

"Yuugao," he said, and his voice was low, demanding her attention. "You didn't do anything wrong. You did just what Ryouma or I would have done in similar circumstances. None of us thought we'd be dealing with someone capable of actually breaking Shou's genjutsu and attacking in force. You were patrolling here, where there was the most risk of a lone operator stumbling onto your position."

He looked at her then, standing stone still, insisting she meet his gaze. "You saved Shou's life, and you saved the mission, because he didn't have to drop the jutsu. Our mission was successful because of the part you played in it. Stop worrying about what might have been. For the future, we'll learn from this. If we're ever in a similar situation, I'll advise whomever is doing guard duty to pop up a clone."

Yuugao grimaced. Why hadn't _she_ thought of that? She took a large bite of her melting candy bar to stifle the instinctive _I'm sorry, sir_; at the moment, she was fairly sure an apology wouldn't go over well. (When did it ever?)

The chocolate coated the inside of her mouth, smooth and rich and creamy; she swallowed and looked at the wrapper in surprise. This was the _good_ stuff. Did Hayate habitually reward his squadmates with chocolate for a job well done?

Izumo would surely have something to say about that.

"Yes, sir," she said at last, resisting the urge to drop her eyes to his shoulder or throat. "I understand." A moment of hesitation, and then, quietly, "Thank you, Hayate-taichou."

"I hope you do," Hayate said, and didn't break his gaze. "You are an integral, critical part of Squad Six. We just successfully completed our first mission as a team." He looked away at last and leaned back in an arch with his hand on his hip, stretching his back. "Well, want to help me give Ryouma his chocolate?" he asked, and popped the last bite of the bar Yuugao had shared with him in his mouth. "And next time, you really are allowed to eat the whole thing." 

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Six_

_A cast list, for those struggling with the large numbers of characters we've introduced, can be found at:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com / 2063 . html _


	7. Zen Master

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on out livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 7: Zen-master**_

Kotetsu swung in the doorway between kitchen and living room, watching Izumo vacuum. "It's just Yuugao and Hayate and Anko," he said. "Not like we're expecting some daimyou to come in here, or photographers from _Chic and Stylish_." He picked up a plum from a bowl on the counter and ate it happily, plum juice oozing unheeded down his chin.

"Yeah, but it's Yuugao," Izumo reminded him, shoving the vacuum briskly under the legs of the couch. "If she sees things out of place, she'll tidy them. She can't help herself. And as amusing as _you_ think that is," he added, eying his roommate, "the object of the game tonight is to observe the, uh, subjects in their natural environment. Not to show Hayate exactly how neurotic Yuugao is."

"So you admit you're matchmaking?" Kotetsu laughed and straightened a couple of out-of-place magazines on a side table. "Or are you still pretending like Yuugao's crush is utterly innocent, and all about how 'totally amazing' her captain's jutsu was?"

Izumo grinned. "Not _matchmaking_. Not yet, anyway. Just natural curiosity, y'know?" He ran the vacuum over the center of the floor once more and turned it off. "I've heard lots about him from her, and pretty much nothing about her from him—you know what the last few poker nights have been like. He's barely talked. I figured if we get 'em together we can at least see for ourselves what's going on—if anything is."

"You think him not talking is a sign?" Kotetsu asked, and unplugged the cord from the vacuum, tossing it to Izumo with a practiced underhand. "I mean, he's like that a lot. I don't know why we keep playing with him, really. Guess it's cause he has the decency to lose some of the time."

"You beat him when you cheat," Izumo reminded him as he began to wrap the cord. "I _never_ do." Which was why he and Iruka always insisted they keep the stakes low. The games were far more about the company than about the winnings (or losses), anyway.

He glanced at the wall-clock as he trundled the vacuum off into its spot in the little storage room in the back. "Eight-twenty. You told Yuugao to show up at eight-thirty, right? And everyone else at quarter till? Did Iruka say whether or not he was going to come?"

"Iruka's being boring and staying home to grade papers or something," Kotetsu said with a sigh. "He's turning into an old man before our very eyes. That Academy job is _ruining_ him." He finished his plum and flicked the pit at Izumo. "And I don't only win when I cheat. Sometimes I win fair and square. Besides, like Genma says, it's not cheating if you're a ninja."

Izumo caught the plum pit one-handed without even looking. Paperwork ninja he might be, but he was still a Konoha chuunin and a damn good one at that. "Too bad about Iruka. Do you think we should invite anybody else—create a smoke-screen? Yuugao might suspect something if it's just her and Hayate and Anko and us. Though Anko's a pretty good distraction on her own," he added thoughtfully.

"Anko's a good distraction. She'll keep things lively," Kotetsu said. "Besides, I got good beer. We'll get everyone a little mellow, feed 'em that salsa stuff you made. And then I'm totally taking home the pot tonight, cause Hayate will be distracted by having Yuugao there."

"Gods, I hope so." Izumo wandered into the kitchen and dumped the plum pit into the garbage can. "They both need to get laid. I _know_ it's been years since Yuugao was actually dating anyone—probably not since she made jounin. And Hayate's almost as bad. Do you even know when his last girl was?"

"He had that girl from the bakery last fall," Kotetsu said, and sprawled gracelessly on the couch, propping his feet up on the table. "I think she broke it off 'cause she never knew when she was gonna see him." He looked up at Izumo expectantly. "Get me a beer, will you? Anyway, that's why I always say stay away from the civvies."

"So their schedules work together, and Yuugao's a hell of a lot more impressed with him than she was with that chuunin punk." Izumo grinned as he pulled a chilled can out of the fridge and tossed it from the kitchen door. "Obviously, they're perfect for each other." If only relationships really _did_ work like that... He and Kotetsu had spent about as many years looking after the skinny girl with the huge dark eyes and the long purple hair as she had spent tagging after them and insisting that she was looking out for them as well. As it turned out, she was often the one to turn the tide when Izumo and Kotetsu got in over their heads—but not years nor skill nor rank would ever keep Izumo from thinking of her as the little sister neither he nor Kotetsu had ever had. The little sister they wanted to see happy, at any price.

Of course, if they could amuse themselves while doing so... On with the show!

There was a noise. Not the sort of noise that would make anyone alarmed. Not even the sort of noise that would make most ninja sit up and take notice. But Kotetsu heard it, and he recognized it. Footsteps outside their gate, the subtle creak of the aged hinges. "She's here," he said, and popped open his beer. He made sure to sprawl extra sloppily across the couch, so Yuugao would have something to complain about. He was a good friend like that, after all. Thoughtful. Considerate. "You gonna let her in?"

Izumo rolled his eyes at Kotetsu but headed for the door. He opened it just as Yuugao's hand lifted to knock, and he grinned at her exasperated expression. "Hey, Yuugao. Good of you to share your day off with us."

"I'm here because you two asked me to be," she pointed out, as he stepped back to let her in. She toed her sandals off in the entry-way and added, "Kotetsu said there would be food." A casual wave to Kotetsu; a slight, predictable, narrowing of the eyes. "If you're going to prop your feet up on the table like that, you should wash them first."

"I'll have you know my feet were licked clean by Izumo himself," Kotetsu said, and lifted one foot into the air, towards their guest. "And there is food. He made those chicken skewer things with the hot sauce."

Yuugao winced involuntarily; Izumo laughed and shut the door. "Shut up, Ko, that was private," he said fondly. Yuugao was the one to roll her eyes, this time. She padded barefoot across the floor and sank into the couch on the side Kotetsu wasn't occupying, curling her long legs up beneath her. She'd dressed nicely again this evening, Izumo noted, though he sincerely doubted it was for any practical purpose; as strenuously as Yuugao might deny it, he'd noticed long ago that she enjoyed looking pretty and usually dressed as stylishly as the occasion would permit. Probably, having spent the majority of the last few months confined to uniform, she had jumped at the opportunity to dress up again.

"Ko told you Anko's coming over, right?" Izumo asked casually, palming a handful of salted nuts from the bowl on the table. He dropped down to sit cross-legged on the floor by Kotetsu's knees and added, "We were thinking maybe of teaching you to play poker again."

Yuugao looked as if she couldn't decide whether to be thrilled (presumably at the prospect of their friend's appearance) or apprehensive (at the poker?). "Ryouma-senpai's been teaching me, too," she said. "I do all right as long as we're playing with our masks on. Shut _up_, Kotetsu. When is Anko showing up?"

"Few minutes. We figured we'd give you time to pick the best spot to ambush her," Kotetsu said and grinned. "So you're playing poker with your ANBU buddies and not telling us about it? I'm sure I can speak for Izumo in this: We're hurt. Deeply hurt." His face took on a look of abject sorrow. Gods it was fun to tease the girl.

But all teasing aside, if she was playing cards with Ryouma... maybe this wouldn't be the first time she'd played the zen-master?

"You'd be hurt worse if you actually thought ambushing Anko was a good idea," Yuugao observed, thumping Kotetsu lightly with a throw pillow. "And I'm not actually _playing_ yet. Ryouma-senpai somehow got this idea that I couldn't be on Squad Six and not play poker, so he roped Shou-senpai into helping teach me. It's mostly just been these past few days, since we got back from the mission." Something flickered in her face. Izumo, watching her keenly, traded a significant glance with Kotetsu. She'd told them only a little about her first ANBU mission, other than a vivid description of Hayate's amazing ninjutsu, but it was clear that _something_ had changed; she'd never mentioned spending much time with Ryouma and Shou before.

"So Hayate hasn't been involved?" Izumo asked, digging a little deeper.

She shook her head. For a moment the lightest trace of a flush touched her cheeks. "Ryouma said he'd clean me out if we played him before I knew what I was doing."

The flush was probably just at the memory of her weakness—Izumo had long ago learned to be wary of Yuugao's absurd sensitivity about her perceived shortcomings—but he could still hope!

"No kidding," Kotetsu said. "He completely bankrupted Anko last time we played." He gave a low whistle. Anko was gonna be out for blood tonight, which made for good distractions. Definitely good. "Sounds like your buddies Ryouma and Shou are looking out for you." A thought struck him and he gave Yuugao something approximating a serious look. "You replacing us, Shorty?"

"Replacing you?" Yuugao's brow furrowed in momentary confusion; then it cleared. She thumped Kotetsu again, harder. "Idiot. They're my teammates, not— Not like you guys. Thank heavens," she added under her breath.

"You're asking for a beat-down, little sister," Kotetsu said with a wide grin. He set the pillow right and took a long swallow of his beer. "Anyway, we'll help you with your poker game. You'll be beating the pants off those ANBU guys in no time."

"Hush, Ko," Izumo commanded. "Strip poker should wait until at _least_ the next lesson."

This time Yuugao threw the pillow at him, but it was worth it to see the rising blush in her cheeks.

Of course, it couldn't exactly end there. He threw the pillow back, and Yuugao uncurled enough to kick at him, and then he caught her ankle and Kotetsu went for her ribs. Izumo got a knee in the jaw, and Kotetsu just barely avoided a broken nose from her head-butt, but the odds were against her—and they'd been doing this for years. Within a moment all three of them were rolling on the floor, banging into the coffee-table and couch, in a full-fledged tickle-fight.

They wouldn't have heard Anko even if she _had_ knocked. Izumo only looked up when the door slammed and a cheerful voice inquired, "Did we decide on tickling instead of poker? Yo, Yuugao!"

"Anko!" Yuugao said, breathlessly. "Help!"

"Girls against boys!" Anko exclaimed delightedly, and tackled Kotetsu.

"Ank—!" Kotetsu's greeting was broken by a startled yelp as the hyperactive woman went for a headlock. "Damn, woman!" he grunted, twisting to get free. He hooked a leg around her ankle and tried to sweep it out from under her, crashing into the coffee table and upsetting the bowl of nuts Izumo had set out as part of the poker snacks. "Give a guy a chance to—" his words were cut off again when Anko used some obviously sneaky and underhanded trick to pin him with his face to the floor.

Damn special jounin chicks and their damn tricks.

"You can let me up now," he told the floor, and watched another pistachio roll under the couch.

With Kotetsu distracted, Izumo didn't have a chance; Yuugao writhed and squirmed and ended up kneeling on his chest with his hands pinned around his own throat. "Thanks, Anko," she said gratefully, giving the other young woman a swift smile. "They need a little reminding of their manners every so often."

"_You're_ the ones sitting on people," Izumo pointed out. "I think I've changed my mind about feeding you."

Anko was up in a flash and sitting on the arm of the couch, legs crossed and eyes dancing. "What's for snacks?"

"Well for starters, there's the salted nuts you spilled all over," Kotetsu complained, tugging his t-shirt back into place and running a hand through the wild brush of his hair. The gesture made not one whit of difference to his appearance, but it made him _feel_ like he'd put some effort into straightening himself up a little. "And since you spilled 'em, you get to pick em up." He handed the bowl to Anko with a grin. "There's a couple under the sofa," he said helpfully.

Anko eyed him narrowly. "I out-rank you," she suggested.

"Unfortunately," Yuugao said, stepping off Izumo at last and picking up a handful of scattered nuts, "we're not in the field." She dumped the nuts into Anko's bowl and raked her fingers through her long hair, restoring it far more effectively than Kotetsu had managed with his. Izumo sat up and tugged at the hem of her lacey white blouse. "Strap showing, Yuugao-chan."

"Hey, you shouldn't have told her that!" Anko complained, as Yuugao quickly tucked her bra-strap under the shoulder of her shirt. "Wasn't the whole point—"

Izumo threw an almond at her. Yuugao looked suspicious for a moment—and then far more suspicious, as someone knocked on the door.

Kotetsu left Izumo to run interference with Yuugao and went to get the door. "It's the zen-master!" he said delightedly, and stepped back. "And uh..."

"I hope you don't mind I brought a friend," Hayate said. "You remember Sakamoto Genta, right?"

"Right," Kotetsu agreed and stepped back to let the two men in. "So... Everyone's here. The more the merrier." That was an interesting little wrinkle. But it probably wouldn't hurt. He gave Izumo a quick wink.

"Thanks," Genta said, and stepped through ahead of Hayate, who was carrying the beer. "Hayate said it was gonna be an open poker game and..." he stopped and his smile grew wider, crinkling his eyes up into little slits of happiness. "Yuugao! Hayate didn't tell me you played cards. I suppose it's a requirement on his team, eh?"

As Kotetsu watched, Hayate did the most stunningly un-zen-master-like thing he'd ever seen of the other man. He froze mid-step over the threshold and nearly dropped the beer.

Oh yeah, this was gonna be _perfect,_ Kotetsu thought, with a wide grin of his own. Absolutely _perfect._

Izumo kept his eyes on Yuugao as Kotetsu opened the door; the whole point of the evening was observing her (and Hayate's) reactions, after all. The shock in her eyes was potentially a good thing; the look of utter betrayal that she cast down at Izumo probably wasn't. He smiled hopefully at her and climbed to his feet. From here he could see the faces of their new guests—and Hayate's was _brilliant_. Izumo wished devoutly that Kotetsu had let him invest in that camera last month.

The other ANBU captain wasn't a problem; Hayate had brought him to poker night once or twice before, and he'd been good company and an easy conversationalist. He'd make Anko's smoke-screen even more plausible. Although... Sakamoto Genta was well-known to be gay, wasn't he? So what was Yuugao thinking when she saw him showing up with Hayate? Damn, if she retreated into her shell _now_...

Fortunately, not even Yuugao could ignore a direct question. "I don't play, exactly," she said. "But Ryouma-senpai and Shou-senpai have been teaching me. Apparently it _is_ a requirement."

Her eyes darted to Hayate, and then away. Izumo traded delighted grins with Anko behind her back.

"Don't worry, we'll make sure we play for low stakes while you get your feet wet," Genta said and cast a puzzled look at Hayate.

Kotetsu slapped Hayate on the back and took the beer in a smooth motion. "Come on in. I know you're not afraid of girls, Hayate."

Hayate seemed to recover his composure a little, for his look softened and he smiled at Yuugao. "Hi Yuugao. I didn't realize you knew these card sharks."

"Don't even bother pretending," Kotetsu said, and laughed. _"You're_ the card shark. You're gonna go easy on us tonight, right?"

"I always go easy on you," Hayate said and finally kicked off his sandals and stepped up into the room.

Kotetsu pulled a couple of the beers free from the sack, which he handed off to Izumo. Hayate looked like he could use one, and it was only fair to start getting Yuugao sloshed as well. Well at least a little tipsy. Less panic stricken anyway. He offered a beer to each of them while Izumo did the same for Genta and Anko.

Anko took the beer, but she still looked rebellious. "You went home with half my paycheck last time we played," she reminded Hayate. "How is _that_ going easy?"

"It could have been your full paycheck," Yuugao said. "It's your own fault for betting so much." Despite her deliberately casual tone, her eyes were still wide with shock; she kept sneaking glances at Hayate, as if she didn't quite believe it. His appearance, Izumo wondered, or his...appearance? Come to think of it, Yuugao probably had never seen Hayate out of uniform before. His loose-fitted, faded jeans and white tee-shirt weren't exactly the height of style, but it was a change. (And better than Genta, who was wearing baggy board shorts in a red on faded red flowery print, and a bright yellow shirt that said _Assassins Do It From Behind_.)

Diversion time, Izumo decided. "Anko, you're still cleaning up those nuts, right? Ko, come gimme a hand in the kitchen?"

"Sure," Kotetsu said and made sure to bump Anko on his way past her, so that some of the nuts spilled again. "Oops, sorry."

"Not as sorry as you're gonna be, buster," Anko snapped, grabbing a handful of nuts and shoving them down the back of his shirt.

"Ooooh cheating!" Kotetsu said, and danced out of her way and into the kitchen. But the diversion he could see Izumo had wanted was accomplished. Hayate and Yuugao were both staring at him and Anko like they were idiots.

Genta laughed and took a sip of beer, then got on his hands and knees and starting retrieving lost nuts. "You must have gotten started on the beer before we got here," he said and handed a fistful of nuts up to Anko.

Hayate looked for a moment like he wasn't sure what to do with himself, then set his beer on the coffee table and dropped to the floor to help gather the scattered nuts as well.

The kitchen was set at right angles to the living room, meaning that unless Izumo stood right in front of the pantry and peered around the wall, he couldn't see what was going on. But he had very good hearing, and so he could catch even Yuugao's lowered voice protesting, "Taichou, you don't have to do that—"

"Still calls him Taichou," Izumo murmured to Kotetsu. "Bad sign."

"Yeah," Kotetsu agreed, and poked a finger into a bowl of sauce for a taste. "But did you see Hayate's _face?_ That was fuckin' awesome! He was about to pop a boner just looking at her."

"He's seen _her_ out of uniform before, hasn't he?" Izumo pondered over this for a moment. Well, there would have been the days of the ANBU trials, on which she probably would've been wearing something practical for combat. And...possibly the day of the initiation, with probably the same results. Certainly nothing like the dark red, silky skirt and the lacey off-the-shoulder white blouse Yuugao was wearing tonight. Thinking about it objectively, even Izumo had to admit that Yuugao looked pretty damn sexy. Maybe there was hope.

"Yeah. You shouldn't have adjusted that strap." Kotetsu giggled and opened the fridge, pulling out the plates of chicken skewers they'd prepared before. "I just sauce these up and put 'em on a pan to broil, right?" he asked. "He coulda dressed a little nicer. Unless she goes for that white tee-shirt look. Not that we told him," he added. "And oh man, Sakamoto might as well wear a neon sign saying 'I sleep with other boys.' We gotta make sure she knows Hayate's into chicks, not Genta."

"So...ask Sakamoto how things are going with...Oh, shoot." Izumo frowned at the fruit platter. "He's dating someone right now, isn't he?" Kotetsu had to know; Kotetsu knew the dirt on _everyone._

"Yeah. Another ANBU guy. You know that guy Hiko who comes in with the new codes once a week? Skinny, kinda nerdy guy? Him." Kotetsu set a row of the chicken skewers on a broiler pan then looked around helplessly. "Where's that brush thing you use for these?"

"Second drawer from the top next to the stove," Izumo said automatically, without turning around. "Okay. Ask Sakamoto how Hiko is, make sure to turn the oven on _broil_ instead of _bake_ this time, try to get Yuugao to loosen up... The beer was a good idea. Maybe we should go for shots. No, we're going for romance, not a drunken fling. Besides, they've got to work with each other in the morning." He paused. "You're right. I _am_ match-making."

"You totally are," Kotetsu agreed, and started painting the chicken with the greenish sauce. He reached out and casually changed the oven setting to the one Izumo had specified. Broil. Bake. They were both for cooking, right? "Just, yeah, remember that have to work together thing. Cause both of them will kill us if we fuck up here."

"And that would be even worse than them not hooking up." The Obvious Ninja strikes again! Izumo finished arranging crackers on the cheese tray, dusted his hands off on his jeans, and peeked into the living room. Anko was currently perched on the arm of the couch again and regaling the others with a tale of her latest Really Awesome Mission. Yuugao was sitting beside her, quiet, but she'd tucked her legs up underneath her again; presumably she felt comfortable enough to relax at least a little. Genta had taken one of the comfortable chairs against the wall, which left one more chair open—

And Hayate hadn't taken it. He was sitting on the other end of the couch, with at least two feet between him and Yuugao, but Izumo could ignore that. This was progress! He ducked back into the kitchen. "They're sort of sitting next to each other!"

"Really?" Kotetsu looked up from his chicken artistry and edged to where he could see into the living room himself, trailing spatters of green sauce on the floor from the brush he still held in his hand. "Well damn, he is." He gave Izumo a wink in answer to the scowl he got for his carelessness with the sauce. "Course they've got the Gulf of Juunan between 'em. But look at him. He's even kind of sitting back and relaxing."

"Relaxing is good," Izumo said, much encouraged. "Maybe the beer's working. Clean up that sauce, will you?" He nabbed the brush, blinked as he saw that Kotetsu had actually done a pretty good job with the chicken, and set the brush in the sink before he opened the oven and slid the broiler pan onto the first rack. "Ah, no, on second thoughts, just take the cheese and the fruit out there. I'll bring the chicken in a minute."

Kotetsu snapped him a brief salute and picked up the platter of fruit in one hand, the cheese and crackers in the other, and headed back to the living room. "So who needs more beer?" he asked, still holding the plates. "And we're gonna move on over to the poker table now, 'cause Izumo's about got the hot food ready." He led the way to the dining table set on tatami matting on the other side of the room, and set the fruit and cheese down on it.

"I'll take another," Genta said and joined Kotetsu at the table. He selected one of the fruit kabobs and ate the strawberry off the end with a happy grin.

Hayate waited a moment for Yuugao and Anko to precede him. _Such a well mannered boy,_ Kotetsu thought to himself with a laugh.

Anko called for more beer as well; Izumo pulled several bottles from the refrigerator and ducked out of the kitchen temporarily to pass them around. Anko and Kotetsu had already taken their usual seats across from each other at the round table; Genta sat next to Anko, and after a moment's hesitation Yuugao sank down onto the tatami mat at her other side. Hayate seated himself last, between the other two men. The zen-master seemed just a little less sedate than normal, Izumo noted as Yuugao refused more beer and he handed the last bottle to Hayate. And though the arrival of two new players (and the absence of Iruka) had upset their usual seating arrangement... Well, c'mon, Hayate didn't _have_ to sit directly across from Yuugao.

"Chicken'll be out in a minute," he told them cheerfully as he retreated back to the kitchen. "Go ahead and get things started."

"Dig in," Kotetsu said, and happily sipped his fresh beer. "We'll eat a little, then we'll play." He gave Yuugao a little wink. "You remember which ones are clubs and which ones are spades, right?"

Hayate blinked. And the look of zen came into his eyes just a little more. But it wasn't altogether there. "You really don't know how to play cards, Yuugao?" he asked. "I thought Ryouma and Shou were kidding when they said they had to give you remedial lessons."

"It wasn't remedial," Yuugao snapped; she sounded stung. "I'd never played. I figured anything these idiots enjoyed so much must be..." A moment of hesitation, as if she were carefully selecting her next words. "Morally reprehensible," she finished. Anko sniggered.

"Oh my," Genta said with mock gentility. He laughed and took another fruit skewer.

Hayate blinked slowly at Yuugao, and reached for a piece of cheese. "So then you know Izumo and Kotetsu well?"

Kotetsu nearly sprayed beer out his nose, holding back his laugh.

This was something Izumo wanted to hear. He ducked out of the kitchen again, leaning against the wall with his arms folded and his grin bright. Yuugao shot him a dour look. "I've been trying to keep them from breaking their necks—or anyone else's—for the past eleven years."

"She's done a decent job of it," Izumo chipped in. "Except for the last part. I think you were the one who showed us how to break a man's neck with one hand, Yuugao."

"Well there was that time we bailed her out of a beating when she was nine," Kotetsu said. "So it's not a total one-way street." His eyes glittered and he laughed. "Right Yuun-chan? What would you do without your big brothers Ko and Izu?"

"You're patently older than eleven," Genta observed, "so I take it you are not blood siblings."

Hayate looked a little startled. "I think I'd have known that. I've been playing poker with them since I was sixteen."

Kotetsu snorted. "You mean fleecing us at poker since you were sixteen. But it's only cause we let you win."

"Of course," Hayate agreed. "It's charity." He sifted a little, leaning back and definitely taking on a mellower look. Kotetsu was pleased to see it. The beer was definitely working. Maybe he'd actually make some money tonight. And if Yuugao would quit being such a sourpuss, maybe she'd get lucky with her oh-so-heroic captain.

"Yeah, well, hard-working guy like you, we figure you need some breaks." Izumo kicked a bare heel idly against the wall. "None of us are blood-related, though. We met in the Academy."

"They didn't object _too_ strenuously to me tagging after them," Yuugao said, her voice softening. Her eyes met Izumo's for a moment, and she smiled suddenly, properly: it lit her whole face up. "I never really thanked you for that, did I? You two...made those days much more bearable."

Izumo was fairly sure he knew which days she was referring to, and that they weren't just their Academy years. He shrugged one shoulder and smiled back at her. "Hey, a girl who can put up with Kotetsu can deal with anything."

"So you have them to thank for the training in tolerating idiot males that let you decide to make a career of ANBU?" Genta laughed. "Well Hayate, I see what we need to do to recruit more kunoichi. Find the girls that are friends with the boys."

Hayate laughed too. His eyes were entirely on Yuugao, Kotetsu noticed. _Damn, _ Izumo was good at that matchmaking thing.

"Izu," Kotetsu said. "The chicken's gonna burn."

"It's not," Izumo snapped, but he wheeled for the kitchen anyway. In the nick of time, actually—Kotetsu was good with things like that. Izumo rescued the (perfectly done) chicken, piled the pieces high on a new plate, snagged another two beers, and returned to the dining room. "You," he told Anko, setting one of the bottles in front of her just as she finished her second one, "are going to end up sloshed and cleaned out tonight, and no one can say I didn't warn you."

"I'll keep it in mind," she promised, already wrenching the cap off the new bottle. "I have a new strategy, though. If I'm going to lose, I might as well do it when I'm drunk. Makes for better excuses, later. And better stories." She grinned across the table at Kotetsu. "One of these days I'm going to take you up on that strip poker offer."

Yuugao went red again. "I thought you were joking about that," she hissed to Izumo as he set the plate on the table and settled himself between her and Kotetsu.

Hayate went an interesting shade of red, too. Oh so very much not the zen-master tonight. Kotetsu chortled and reached for the chicken. "Anko, I always knew there was a reason I loved you."

"Are you serious?" Genta laughed. "And you know the rumor is that you love Izumo, not Anko. I think he'll be hurt to learn otherwise."

"Oh no, never," Kotetsu protested, keeping an eye on the redness in Hayate's cheeks. That was never there _before_ when they'd discussed strip poker. Or at least not quite so bloomingly brilliant.

"I love Izumo the best, no question. My love for Anko is more of a... a..." He groped for words, then yelped when someone's foot landed a solid kick to the inside of his thigh. "Hey! I wasn't gonna say anything bad."

"It's still not much of a compliment to hear you're second-best," Anko sniffed, settling herself comfortably again. "Speaking of which, Yuugao, you found anyone to convince you you're first-best yet?"

Izumo grinned. Yuugao's blush went crimson. "Anko!" she hissed.

"Guess that means no," Anko concluded cheerfully. "Our company of Devilishly Attractive Single Kunoichi is in no danger, then. You can always join the auxiliary branch," she informed Genta and Hayate. "Izumo and Kotetsu can't because they refuse to answer questions, but Single Shinobi could always use more members."

"Oooh, speaking of rumors," Kotetsu chimed in with a grin at Anko. "I heard Genta hooked up with that hottie Hidehiko from coding all the kunoichi were lusting after. Did you?"

Genta laughed and waved a hand self-deprecatingly. "We've seen each other a few times," he answered. "But I don't know that I'd call it a hook-up yet."

"Pay up," Kotetsu said, holding a hand out to Anko. "Told you he was gay. You should know better than to doubt me."

Hayate grinned, taking it all in. "Don't worry, Yuugao," he said, casting her a warm look. "It's always a little... lively... at poker night."

"That shirt's proof enough," Anko grumbled, digging in her pocket and casting a dirty look at Genta's bright, emblazoned tee-shirt. Yuugao looked faintly scandalized, but at least her blush was fading. She even met Hayate's eyes, Izumo noted with interest. And her bottle was nearly half-empty—about the same level as Hayate's, though she was still on her first.

"It's lively around here whether or not it's poker night," Yuugao pointed out. She selected a fruit kabob and eyed it warily. "Does anyone want the cantaloupe?"

"You don't like melon?" Hayate asked. "I do. Melons are great." He stopped open-mouthed when Kotetsu and Anko dissolved in gales of laughter. "I... I mean..."

"He means, 'Sure, I'd love some of your melons,'" Kotetsu said, and nearly choked he was laughing so hard.

This time it wasn't Anko who kicked him. Yuugao had gone brilliant scarlet again. No wonder she was so tense all the time; her blood pressure had to be skyrocketing from all that blushing. Izumo said sternly, "Leave the pieces you don't want on the tray. Ko, shut up and deal."

"You set up the chips then," Kotetsu said and leaned down to massage his leg. "And damn, woman, you don't have to aim for quite such a vulnerable spot."

Hayate was still trying to regain his composure, using his half-empty beer as the focus for that. Genta patted him on the back. "I'm afraid you walked right into that one, Hayate." He looked up at Anko. "And what's wrong with my shirt? I love this shirt. I got it on a mission to Wave country."

"Nothing's _wrong_," Anko said, still giggling. "It just says a lot about you. Like Ibiki and his trench coat. Me and my fishnet." She glanced around the table. "Yuugao and her hair."

"My hair?" Yuugao blinked. She was leaning on the table, chin cupped in her hands and fingers spread over her cheeks in an apparent (and fruitless) attempt to disguise the blushing. "Anko, I think you're drunk."

"Possibly," Anko admitted. "Okay, time to start the poker!"

"Oh Anko's not _nearly_ drunk!" Kotetsu laughed. "Maybe a little tipsy." He produced a pack of cards and tossed them to Hayate. "You want to break the seal?"

It was Genta's excellent reflexes that saved Hayate getting struck in the face. The other ANBU captain shot out a hand and caught the deck, while Hayate just blinked. Red-faced. Not looking at Yuugao. Although given the provocation Kotetsu knew he'd given the man, it wasn't that surprising. And look, Yuun-chan was blushing, too.

"Hayate needs another beer," Genta said, and broke the seal on the deck himself. "And if these are marked cards, don't think we won't notice."

"If Ko's tampered with 'em, you have my full permission to deck him," Izumo assured him, pushing himself up and away from the table. He padded into the kitchen and retrieved several more chilled bottles from the fridge. They'd already raced through Hayate's six-pack and were well on their way to working through the beer Kotetsu had stocked. If they drank much faster they'd be out of beer, and he'd be forced to break out the _good_ stuff.

He said as much as he came back into the dining room and handed around the bottles: one each for Hayate, Genta, and Kotetsu. Anko wasn't quite done with her third, and Izumo was about to keep the last bottle for himself until he noticed that Yuugao had set her empty bottle on the carpet beside her. He popped the cap casually and set the new bottle down at her right hand before he dropped into his seat beside her and reached for a skewer of chicken. Yuugao and Genta, he noticed, were the only ones who'd made any real inroads on the food. "Anko wants to get drunk," he observed, "but the rest of you are gonna have to get eating if you don't want to end up actually playing strip poker."

Yuugao hastily took another two fruit kabobs.

"Yeah, eat, Hayate," Genta said, and handed him a chicken skewer. "I don't want to end up holding your head while you puke those beers back up in the bushes."

"I'm not that much of a lightweight," Hayate complained, taking the chicken. He glanced up at Yuugao with a shy sort of smile on his lips. "Don't let them um, bother you too much," he said. "Or tell you too many lies about me."

"Oh it's no lie," Genta laughed. "Hayate's a great guy, and he can usually hold his liquor. But only if you make him eat. Ryouma and Shou will tell you the same thing." He stuck a skewer in his mouth and started riffling the cards, arching and bridging them, breaking them in as he shuffled.

Kotetsu stretched out his legs and gave Izumo a little nudge under the table. So far so good, right?

"So what are we playing?" Genta asked, and started to deal.

_ a few hours later _

The party broke up shortly before midnight, as usual; the ANBU pleaded work in the morning, and although Izumo was quite sure that none of them had missions and that he and Kotetsu were the only ones who actually had to show up to their office before nine o'clock, he was happy enough to say goodbye. As Yuugao lived only a few blocks away, Hayate and Genta had offered to walk her home, and she had accepted with only a token protest. Their departure left Izumo, Anko, and Kotetsu to clean up and analyze the hell out of every glance and every word.

Anko wasn't nearly as drunk as she'd seemed a moment ago, although she'd lost badly enough to make it realistic. "Lots easier to watch what's going on when people think you're drunk," she told Izumo as she helped him tote the crumb-sprinkled platters back into the kitchen. "Course there's more to observe when the rest of 'em are drunk, too. Didja notice Hayate didn't win as big as usual, tonight?"

"I noticed _I_ actually won a little," Izumo said, grinning. Yuugao had, too; beginner's luck, she'd claimed, but Izumo wondered if the causes lay more in her growing interest in the game (and, perhaps, a little leniency on Hayate's part?). Genta had lost a little, as had Kotetsu, despite his steadily more outrageous cheating.

"He may have won less, but he still won," Kotetsu grumbled, and tossed several empty bottles into a paper sack for recycling. "So you think he likes her? He's still the damn Zen-master. Man is he hard to read." He clinked several coins together in his pocket and frowned. "We should have gotten him more drunk. _She_ likes him though. Totally."

"She actually started calling him by name about halfway through!" Anko agreed happily. She swiped her finger through the congealed green sauce on the empty chicken-platter and sucked it thoughtfully. "I don't think she drank enough to invite him in once he gets her home, though. And Genta's there. Damn. One of you boys should've distracted him. Both? I bet he'd've gone for a threesome."

"We wanted to talk this over," Izumo reminded her. "And if Genta knew we're trying to set them up he'd probably feel honor-bound to tell Hayate, or something. Besides—"

"Oooh, we're trying to set them up now?" Anko asked, delighted. "That's much better than just observing!"

"Hey, you know our rule about sleeping with jounin," Kotetsu reminded Anko. "Don't get in bed with people who can tie better knots than you can." He picked up another near-empty and tilted the bottle to drain the last dregs. They were all friends here, right? Although, eww, warm beer. Must have been Yuugao's—she was the one who nursed hers the longest.

"Anyway it's Izumo who's trying to set them up. I'd rather play junior naturalist. So you both agree with my observation then? She's like one of those chicks in the comics with the little hearts in her eyes?"

Izumo stoppered the sink, squirted a dash of liquid soap into the bottom, and turned the tap on hot. "I'm...well, I think you're half-right. I'd bet my hitai'ate that she's got the beginnings of a good crush going, but a good part of it's hero-worship, and if she's aware of it at all she's probably convinced herself that's all it is." He grinned. "You know our Yuun-chan. She can take self-deception to the max."

"I'm more worried about her hang-ups with rules getting in the way, actually," Anko said. She leaned against the kitchen counter, surprisingly serious. "Even if she had Konoha's biggest crush on Hayate, d'you think she'd ever say anything to her captain? And what about _him?_"

"Zen-master?" Kotetsu reached for the first clean dish and started drying it. "I have _no_ idea. Sometimes he seems like the world's most upstanding citizen—well aside from being a captain in the baby-murder division." He paused, looking up as if the answer were somewhere on the ceiling.

"Nah, I think he'd probably... No wait..." Another long pause, as the dish drying came to an absolute halt. "Maybe Genta'd talk him into it. I heard he used to fool around with a teammate."

Izumo blinked. "That must've been a while ago. Kazuhiro and Masao are about as straight as they come, and Isato was married, wasn't he?"

"His wife's living with her mother now," Anko agreed. "This was two, three years ago, maybe? Right after he got promoted to captain of Squad Three. And it wasn't his own teammate—he was from Squad Five or Six, I think. Honda Asato."

Passing another dish to Kotetsu, Izumo whistled. "Hey, I thought Ko and I are supposed to be the Ninja Who Know Everything. Where d'you come up with all the good gossip?"

Anko's lips curled back in a startlingly feral grin. "I know Asato. Dated his little brother." Her expression was a clear enough indication of how _that_ one had gone.

"Ah," Izumo said, and added hastily, "So, what'd you observe about Hayate?"

"Well, his card playing was off," Kotetsu said, and went back to drying. He handed Anko a clean plate. "Stick this in that cupboard," he told her, nodding at the intended place. "Also he drank more than usual. And ate less. He's gonna have a hangover in the morning."

"He blushed an awful lot," Anko added. "Usually he's fine with the dirty jokes. And it's not just 'cause there were girls there—he never gets embarrassed when it's just _me_."

"Maybe you're just one of the guys," Izumo said, scrubbing away at the last platter.

Anko made a face at him. "The way I dress, I sure as hell hope not!"

"Wait," Kotetsu said, and looked at Anko critically. "Don't tell us you've been carrying a torch for Hayate all this time and never told us! Poor Anko-chan! And now you've got a rival."

He was just _asking_ to be hit, and Anko obliged. She didn't look terribly upset, though. Yuugao would have belted him, sure, but she would've been blushing like mad while she did it. Anko seemed incapable of blushing. She said coolly, "I could get Hayate if I wanted him. Fortunately for him, I don't. He's a little too..."

"Upstanding?" Izumo suggested.

"Bland," Anko decided. "And short. Now, Morino in T&I is another matter altogether..."

"Short?" Kotetsu sputtered. He stood a scant half a centimeter taller than Anko, and while it wouldn't be fair to call him sensitive about his height—after all Izumo was only slightly taller—he'd had to admit it was kind of cool that Genta was the shortest guy at their poker night for a change. "Hayate's not short. And there's nothing wrong with short guys anyway."

He took another dish and dried it furiously. "Also Hayate's not really bland. I mean, he's not boring like what's his name in mission assignments. And you're out of your mind if you have your heart set on Morino. That dude... Ugh." Kotetsu shuddered and thrust the dry plate at Anko.

"My heart's not set on Morino!" Anko said indignantly. "I just like tall, dark, and, um, interesting. I could go after Namiashi Raidou if you prefer."

"So interesting means scarred," Izumo interpreted, turning off the tap and pulling the stopper out of the drain. "Well, Anko, your selection should be pretty good in this village. Though if you went after Raidou, you might have to fight Genma for him."

"I thought so," Anko agreed. "Anyway, we're talking about Yuugao's love life—or lack of one—not mine. She's interested but may never figure it out. Hayate might be. Or he might have a fever."

"Well whatever he has," Kotetsu said, and took the last dish to dry, "he just better not hurt our Yuun-chan. Cause I'd hate to have to commit treason and kill a superior officer and all that. But if he breaks her heart we have to kill him. Agreed?"

"I'll do it!" Anko chirped. "He doesn't outrank _me_."

"That's...one solution," Izumo said, rolling his eyes. "I think I'm just gonna hope it works out great."

"Pussy," Kotetsu said, and snapped the towel at Izumo's ass. "You'll step up if it comes to it. Besides, it'd be three against one. He can't be _that_ good."

"Yuugao thinks so," Anko smirked. She shoved herself away from the counter at last and looked around the clean kitchen. "So, when are we doing this again?" 

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Seven_

_A cast list, for those struggling with the large numbers of characters we've introduced, can be found at:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com / 2063 . html _


	8. A Good Offense

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on our livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 8: A Good Offense**_

The end of September brought fall with a vengeance, as the leaves turned scarlet and gold and began to fall from the trees in huge eddies of flame. The wind turned cold, and scudding clouds ripped through the grey sky. ANBU's Quartermaster issued winter cloaks and scarves, and Yuugao turned up the heat in her apartment and hauled out her winter bedding. Ryouma, of course, started wearing shorts whenever he wasn't in uniform. He seemed to thrive on being contrary--or at least on Shou worrying aloud about hypothermia.

A chance comment a few days earlier had given both Shou and Ryouma something else to worry about, however. They seemed to look on Yuugao as their special protégée, and once they'd pronounced themselves satisfied with her poker playing, they'd begun prowling around looking for other things to improve. It was Shou who noticed that he'd never once seen Yuugao draw her regular issue katana; and it was Ryouma who pried out of her the reluctant admission that she didn't know how to use it.

Of course Hayate would have been the best person to ask for lessons. But Yuugao found herself curiously unwilling to broach the subject with him--especially since it meant admitting that she'd never learned how to wield any edged weapon longer than a kunai. Ryouma insisted that in a few weeks he and Shou could teach her enough of the basics to make a decent showing when she asked Hayate for advanced lessons. And they'd been right about the poker. Yuugao gave up her afternoon personal training time without a qualm.

But on the fourth afternoon of her training with her senpai, something was a little off. Usually they had the training field to themselves, but today Sakamato-taichou's men of Squad Three had taken the other end of the field for their own training. Yuugao had met them all before, on a mission last month that had seen Squad Three providing back-up while Squad Six took point. She quite liked Kazuhiro-senpai and Masao-senpai, and in the field she'd mostly been able to ignore Yonda Daisuke's critical eyes and occasional whispered gibes. Today, however, as the other squad finished its training and Kazuhiro and Masao wandered off, Daisuke hung around on the very edges of Squad Six's training space. And as much as Yuugao focused, she couldn't quite forget that he was watching.

It made her reactions slow and her parries sloppy, and Shou broke off the spar at last with a shake of his head. "We're all tired, I think," he said kindly. "That's enough for today." He picked up his cloak and scarf from their neatly-folded pile on the ground, and prodded Ryouma--sprawled bonelessly next to them with his eyes closed and his head pillowed on his hands--with his toe. "Wake up, lazybones. Time to go home."

"Wasn't sleeping," Ryouma objected. He rubbed his eyes and clambered to his feet. "Gods, I'm starving. Same time tomorrow, Yuu-chan?"

"All right." Yuugao knelt to collect her own belongings. Her hands were shaking a little, she noticed. Probably it was just from the cold and the long afternoon of hard work, but she couldn't help the feeling that she would have done far better without the sure knowledge of those critical eyes following her. And the direct corollary to that, of course, was that in a few short weeks she'd have Hayate watching her even more critically. If Daisuke was throwing her off her stride now, how would she manage with Hayate--one of Konoha's best swordsman, her captain, and...and a man she respected very much--observing her?

Ryouma and Shou were already heading to the locker rooms by the time Yuugao rose to her feet again, with her katana bound up in a neat bundle with her cloak and scarf and her sweating shoulders left bare to the cooling wind. She stopped at the drinking fountains before she followed them. And this time, she knew it when the ANBU agent stepped up behind her.

"Yonda-san," she said evenly. She wiped the water from her mouth with the edge of her gloved hand before she turned. As she'd expected, he was standing directly behind her, far too close for comfort. Yuugao's lips tightened. "If you'd step aside, I can move and you can get a drink."

He ignored that, as she'd guessed he would. "Judging from your performance today," he said bluntly, "I'm wondering why you're not dead yet."

"My specialty is taijutsu, not kenjutsu," Yuugao said. He went on as if he hadn't heard her.

"With sword work like that, someone ought to tell Quartermaster to start getting the paperwork ready for your funeral. Too bad you'll be taking down good men like your teammates with you. I guess the extra practice here is them trying to save their own asses." His smirk was a mere parody of solemnity. "But it looks hopeless."

"The only hopeless thing here is your attitude," Yuugao snapped. "If I'd never touched a sword in my life I could still do my job. And my sword work is less of a detriment to my team than your attitude is to yours." She pushed away from the fountain, attempting to pass him on the left. He stepped easily in front of her, a wall of muscle not quite as tall or as sturdy as Ryouma but just as forbidding.

Daisuke's voice dropped until it hit its bottom registers. "I'm the last man to say kunoichi don't have a place in Konoha's service, but what you do isn't anything like what we do. You don't have the same abilities. You're _different."_ His lip curled in something between a sneer and a smile. "Your teammates may not want to admit it--well, you've gotta be a good lay, I don't blame 'em, but--"

Yuugao struck him, so hard and so fast that he didn't have a chance to dodge. Her knuckles split on his teeth, but the sharp pain was almost as satisfying as seeing him reel back spitting blood. He lifted a hand to his mouth and stared at her incredulously. She glared back, with the hot sharp rage unrestrained in her eyes. "Say that again, and you'll lose more than teeth."

Daisuke held his split lip, but the shock on his face was quickly replaced with that same superior smirk. "Ooooh. Pussy has sharp claws, is that what you want to prove?" He laughed. "But don't worry, kitten, you're safe here. I make it a policy not to hit people weaker than myself. Like women and children." He paused, watching the rage flare in her eyes to a white heat.

"Of course, if you endanger me or my team on a _mission,"_ he hissed, "that would be entirely different."

At that moment, Yuugao would have given almost anything to keep her word. It had been so easy to hit him; it would be only a little harder to seriously incapacitate him, to leave him with injuries that would take months to heal--even snapped vertebrae or torn tendons that would keep him from ever serving as a shinobi again. But the anger that burned sun-hot behind her breastbone made her thinking unnaturally clear at the same time as it drove her to lust for blood. Training scraps and minor fights between shinobi might be overlooked, but a serious fight would bring down far more trouble than his insults were worth. And if she really _did_ strike him again--she wasn't sure she'd be able to stop until the job was done, and Yonda permanently silenced.

_He_ wasn't worth that. Yuugao clenched her jaw, relaxed her fist just enough to form a single one-handed seal, and translocated away.

She put enough chakra and enough fury into it that she managed to move farther in one jump than she ever had before. When the world faded back into focus around her, she was standing in the hallway on the second floor of ANBU HQ, just outside the closed door of Squad One's captain's office. The hall was empty; good. Yuugao clutched her bundle of cloak and scarf and sword to her chest, hard enough to have snapped anything less sturdy than the sheathed katana, and stalked towards Squad Six's office.

But the office was empty as well. Yuugao nearly swore. She'd forgotten that Hayate spent most of the afternoon in captains' meetings. Well, she could wait here for a little while, at least. There were folders and old reports scattered everywhere over the captain's desk, and while straightening it up would take only a minute or two, surely some of it was squad paperwork that Hayate or Shou hadn't yet gotten around to doing. Yuugao set to work with a vengeance.

As long as she was doing something, maybe her nerve wouldn't fail her.

* * *

Hayate was glad when the meeting was finally over. It had been a long one, which was good in some respects. They'd been going over the latest mission reports and the newest assignments to come into ANBU, divvying them up between teams. A long meeting meant there had been a lot of missions, both completed and incoming, to cover. And that meant ANBU was operating at high capacity, and revenues were coming in to Konoha.

He glanced at his watch--too late to see if his team was still sparring--surely they'd be done by now. He'd have to find Shou or Ryouma and get their assessment later, since he'd asked them to work with Yuugao a little on her bladework. Her failure to use her katana on missions or in spars had not gone unnoticed by her captain, but he didn't want to intimidate her by speaking about it to her directly.

With the autumn coming on, it was getting darker earlier. Not so much as to really seem wintery yet, but the light slanting in through the windows of the conference room had that late-afternoon golden-glow to it. Maybe some dinner, Hayate decided, putting his papers in order.

Genta had apparently had the same thought, for the captain of squad three popped up at his friend's elbow with a single word on his lips: "Sushi?"

"You made of money these days?" Hayate asked. "I was thinking something a little more pedestrian, like curry, or maybe omu-rice."

"You saw the same figures I did in that meeting," Genta laughed. "I think you can afford sushi tonight. We'll both be getting mission bonuses in the next paycheck."

It was hard to turn down sushi, and Genta had a point. "Alright, but if we're getting sushi it has to be the good stuff," Hayate said and accompanied Genta out of the room and down the hall. "I need to stop by my office first, though."

"Sure, sure," Genta said easily. "I do too. Need to put some stuff away, see if the gang left me any progress reports on their work today..."

"See if Hiko left you a love note in your in-basket," Hayate finished for him.

"Yep, that too," Genta said with a wide grin. "See you in twenty minutes?"

"Even if you have a love note?" Hayate asked.

"Yeah, Hiko's busy tonight. They're working on some kind of massive code redesign or something, because they're worried Grass broke one of the old ones."

"Oh, so I'm second best," Hayate pretended to frown.

"You don't want to be my first best, Haya. Just ask Hiko."

Hayate laughed and stopped at his office door. "See you in twenty, Genta. First round's on you." Genta gave a little salute and headed down to his own office, and Hayate pushed his squeaky door open.

Finding Yuugao hard at work sitting at his desk was a bit of a surprise. She looked disheveled, her hair a little fly-away, her cheeks slightly flushed.

"How was your spar?" Hayate asked and added the papers he was carrying in an untidy jumble to the ones Yuugao had been so patiently trying to straighten.

As soon as Yuugao heard the door creak open, her rage-tempered resolve started to crack. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe it was an even worse idea than breaking Yonda Daisuke's jaw. Maybe she should hunt him down and--

And her captain was speaking. Yuugao looked up a little too late, wondering fleetingly if she should try for a false smile and a cheerful lie. But Ryouma and Shou might mention that she'd been off today, and that might lead into a few too many probing questions that Yuugao had no desire to answer.

So instead she pushed her chair back from the desk and stood, throwing her head back almost defiantly as she gathered the last of her fast-shredding nerve.

"Hayate-taichou, may I beg you to teach me the sword?"

"Beg?" Hayate's eyebrows rose. "Why would you have to beg? Did you lose a bet with Shou and Ryouma or something?" That was one possible explanation for the defiance in her eyes and the oddly humble tone. "I hoped you'd know by now you could simply ask me and I'd say yes." He smiled and sat on the couch, leaning back a little, and waving a hand at the desk. "You didn't have to bribe me by doing my timesheets. Although I'll admit I'm grateful."

If Shou and Ryouma had her sword work polished to the point where she was ready to ask him for a lesson, Hayate was more than pleased to give her his time.

"It wasn't a bet, and it's not a bribe." Yuugao knew her tone was sharpening but couldn't quite help it. There was no way under heaven she was going to mention Daisuke, unless Hayate asked so directly that she couldn't avoid it. But she couldn't lie to him about it, either. Choosing her words very carefully, she said, "I had planned to continue working with Ryouma-senpai and Shou-senpai for a few more weeks. But I...would like to learn faster. And both of them agree you're a better teacher."

Her voice softened, with effort. "Please, taichou. This...means a great deal to me."

_It's the one way I have left to prove myself. And if I have to work my hands to bloody rags to shove the lie in Yonda's teeth, I'll do it._

Hayate wasn't sure what was underlying the urgency, but... How could he refuse? He'd intended to spend some time working with Yuugao on her kenjutsu anyway, as soon as she was ready for him. If she felt ready now, then... He should stop avoiding it.

It was a shock to realize that that was what he'd been doing. But he had. He'd avoided it, and asked Ryouma and Shou to work with her, because... Because he didn't want to cross any lines.

"I'll meet you tomorrow afternoon. Are you free at 3:00?" he asked and sat up a little straighter. "You'll want to come limbered up but fresh." _Bring your blade_ went unsaid. It didn't need saying.

"I'll be free," Yuugao promised. Ryouma and Shou might be a problem; they certainly wouldn't let it go without an explanation, especially given her performance today. But they were a problem she'd deal with. Somehow.

Hayate's easy acceptance had brought up a more pressing problem, anyway. She was a quick learner, but even four days of Ryouma's instruction and Shou's help wasn't enough to prepare her for what Hayate would undoubtedly demand. Daisuke just watching had thrown her off her stride today...

But Daisuke talking had done a great deal more, and with her anger rekindling at the mere memory of his insults, Yuugao was recklessly ready to take anything her captain could throw at her.

"Where should I meet you?"

Hmm, that was a good question. "Training field seventeen," Hayate said, after a moment's thought. That was isolated enough they didn't have to worry about interruptions by other teams in training, and it had some interesting terrain. A creek ran through one edge, there were trees along another. "I think it will be best to work outdoors, where the ground will be similar to what we face on a mission," he told her. "I'll see you there at three." He gave Yuugao a small smile. "I'm looking forward to it."

Hayate moved towards his desk. "Hope you don't mind if I kick you out of my chair for a moment? I just need to put those reports away."

Yuugao gave him a nod and stood up with a soft, "Thank you, Taichou," on her lips.

"See you tomorrow," Hayate said and watched her go. Then he sat down, stared at the papers Yuugao had done for him with a slightly baffled smile, and put things in order so he could go have sushi with Genta.

* * *

Hayate didn't exactly sleep poorly that night, but he was a little preoccupied. There were, as Ryuuhei and Ibiki and a number of other people had pointed out, issues with having a woman on your squad. What Hayate hadn't expected was for one of those issues to be himself. But every now and again he'd catch himself looking at Yuugao moving during a spar and think not what a fine shinobi she was, but what a fine woman. He told himself sternly to ignore it. She was his subordinate, and she didn't need him acting like a teenager over her; it was conduct unbecoming and it was, he decided, a betrayal by his own body.

So any time he had a waking thought that tended in the direction of seeing Yuugao as anything other than an ANBU squadmate, Hayate did the mental equivalent of dousing his brain with a cup of ice-water. It didn't however, do a damn thing for his dreams.

That night he dreamed without remembering it. But he woke up with a certain feeling of dread. He was meeting Yuugao for a spar one-on-one, and he was going to, by all the gods, be professional about it, no matter how good she looked in that tight-fitting ANBU uniform. No matter how distracting it was to stand close to her and smell her scent and feel her chakra.

He got to the training field a half hour early, and was working through katas, sword flashing and slicing through empty air, when she arrived.

Yuugao had forgotten, until that morning, that Hayate had given the squad the day off; she wouldn't have to see Ryouma and Shou at team training that morning to explain. She scribbled two quick notes anyway and gave a young genin a handful of change to deliver them. With luck, by the time she actually saw her senpai the next day, she'd have figured out some sort of explanation. Either she'd have improved enough for Hayate to accept her as a student, or... Or she could accept their teasing with gritted teeth, beg their tutelage again, and work towards the time when she could ask Hayate again.

Her stomach was a tight mass of tension when she arrived at training field seventeen that afternoon, and the cold wind that nipped at her cheeks and tore at her hair certainly didn't help calm her. Hayate was already there, performing his katas with a grace so instinctive and natural that Yuugao almost wanted to leave again. It seemed so private a moment, the slender young man and the swift silvery sword and the empty field full of fallen leaves and wind-whipped tall grass, that she felt absurdly voyeuristic even watching. And yet... She couldn't look away.

She could, however, walk a little closer, intruding into his line of sight, and wait for him to end his kata and notice her.

The sword in Hayate's hand was soothing, the motion of the katas meditative. He saw Yuugao at the edge of the field, and he stopped, blade poised over head, then reached back and slid it soundlessly into its sheath at his back.

"Yuugao," He called a greeting and smiled, waving her over. "Are you all warmed up, or do you want to go through some katas with me?"

This would be fine. He'd taught other shinobi many times before. This was just another lesson.

"I stretched before I came," Yuugao said, obediently wading through the knee-high grass to reach him. She shucked her cloak and scarf a few feet away and tried very hard not to shiver. She'd walked all the way here, so as not to waste chakra in a translocation; but although the walk had loosened her muscles a little more, it had been a hard fight between the warmth of exercise and the chill of the wind. Maybe she should have run. "I'd appreciate the katas, though. I'd like to learn how you do them."

_You'd like to watch how he does them,_ something murmured at the back of her head.

Yuugao told it to shut up.

"Alright," Hayate said, and smiled, holding his hands as if his katana were in them. "Just the motions first. I always start with bare hands to get the joints moving before I load them with the weight of the sword." He straightened his back, legs a hip's width apart, and swung his arms up in a slow arc, then across, slashing a perpendicular to the imaginary line he'd just drawn, and finally a diagonal uppercut, hands turning the pantomime blade so the cutting edge was up.

"Just like that. Do it with me." He watched Yuugao as she mirrored his motions, and nodded, then moved fluidly into a second pattern. She was keeping up well, he noticed, and increased the pace and difficulty until they were both red-cheeked and breathing a little fast.

"Good, you're ready for steel now," he said, and unsheathed his own sword. It fit his gloved hands like a seamless extension of his arms, feeling more natural to him than even moving bare-handed. "Ready?" he asked, and raised his blade.

"Ready," Yuugao affirmed in a voice tightened by breathlessness and excitement. Her own sword would never seem so intrinsic to her being, she knew as she watched her taichou move, his slicing blade almost a living part of him. And yet... She already felt more connected to her regulation katana, more focused, more aware.

More aware of her sword, and of her captain.

The way he moved, with a grace so unconscious it could only stem from the merciless training of years. The way his eyes sought hers over the flash of steel, encouraging, approving. The way his lips parted in a sudden quick grin as she dared to take the initiative and increase her speed...

Yuugao faltered suddenly, her eyes dropping, her sword almost slipping from her chilled fingers. She caught her breath, unwrapped one hand from her sword-hilt to press her palm flat against her racing heart. They'd been working hard, but her pulse should've have risen _that_ far. "Sorry, Taichou," she said, horribly grateful for the exercise-flushed cheeks that masked her rising blush. "I--lost focus. I'm sorry."

Hayate let his own sword rest, and smiled at Yuugao, not thinking about her flushed cheeks or panting, cold-reddened lips. "You were fine right up until the seventh form," he told her. "Catch your breath and we'll start again from the fifth." He raised his sword again, and gave her another encouraging smile, and this time he watched her form more closely as she moved, looking for the sequence that had tripped her up. She seemed to be struggling with the movements from sixth to seventh, her shoulders dropping too far, her hips swaying too much to counterbalance her motion.

"Slow it down a little," Hayate said, stopping her. "Like this." He demonstrated in slow motion, shifting his center of gravity with the moving blade, so that all his power was behind the stroke. "You see?"

She tried hard to focus, setting her jaw and rearranging her sweaty grip on her sword-hilt. It was almost impossible, though, when she couldn't summon up the battle-rage to clear her thoughts and strengthen her movements, when everything from the shift of Hayate's hips to the numb tips of her fingers (_How can my hands be sweating when they're so cold_?) tried to tear her thoughts away. She almost stumbled through the movement from sixth to seventh, worse even than when Daisuke had been watching, and at the end of it she stopped herself, her eyes burning. "Taichou, I... I'm just getting worse. Maybe I'd better practice this on my own for a while."

Getting very far away sounded like a very good idea right now. If she could just calm herself down, somehow shed this terrifying awareness of his body and of her own, remind herself that he was her captain and that whatever her traitorous body felt was of utterly no consequence stacked against that towering fact--

Maybe in a week she'd be able to look him in the eye again.

"You're doing fine," Hayate said, taking her downcast eyes for shame at her poor form, and nothing more. "You just need to get a feel for how your torso needs to move in relationship to your hips and shoulders. Let me show you." Hayate's sword slid with a slick hiss into the sheath at his back and he took up a position behind Yuugao, reaching around her to place his hands over hers on the hilt of her weapon, hips cradling hers, stomach and chest nestled against her back.

"The motion has to start at the base of your spine," he started, feeling his heart pounding suddenly hard under his breastbone. Then she was turning in his arms, twisting towards him, eyes wide and mouth open with what? Shock? Surprise?

And in an instant that Hayate never saw coming, she'd dropped the sword, he'd shifted his hands to her shoulders to pull her the rest of the way around, and was covering her lips with his in a deep, passionate kiss.

The startled protest died on Yuugao's lips, caught up and swallowed in her captain's kiss. If she thought she'd been terrifyingly aware of his movements and of her own reactions before, that was nothing to this preternatural sensitivity, as if her chakra was leaking out of every pore to sense the world around her. Her sword thudding into the grass behind her as she turned, his hands clenching tight on her shoulders, her breasts brushing against his chest, his lips pulling and teasing at hers. His warmth enveloped her, encircling her as effectively as his arms, and met an answering warmth kindling in her chest.

Every rational thought, every half-hearted protest, melted away in that warmth. And in the absence of thought, in a state of pure sensitivity so exquisite it was almost pain, Yuugao met the kiss and returned it. Her mouth closed on his with more heat than gentleness, and her tongue traced his lips with growing eagerness that betrayed all doubts.

She was like a live coal, glowing hot against him. Her chakra, always a sensuous pressure to him, was like heated velvet now, pressing him in a mind-numbing delight that her lips and her eagerness only exacerbated. Gods, yes, it was better than any of his fantasies, much better than his dreams, and it was... It was...

Hayate broke off the kiss abruptly, staring at Yuugao with befuddled, slightly frightened eyes.

It was _wrong._ She was his subordinate and he her captain and this was so out of bounds there was no notion of what was in anymore.

"I... Uh... I'm..." he stammered, staring at her, holding her at arms length. "Um, I... Uh..." His breath was shaky, like he'd been running. Like he'd had the wind knocked out of him in a fight.

"I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry." And he vanished, with a repeat of that translocation jutsu he'd first dazzled her with all those months ago at the ANBU trials.

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Eight_

_A cast list, for those struggling with the large numbers of characters we've introduced, can be found at:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com / 2063 . html _


	9. Defending Her Honor

**Moonlight on Masks  
**

_A collaboration by Kilerkki and Nezuko, Prince of Rats_

_This is a collaborative work, but there is no way for us to both publish it without being in violation of the rules here. Nonetheless, all the work is equally shared, as should be all praise and criticism. _

_ Additional material, including character analysis, discussions, etc, can be found on our livejournal community:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com  
_

_This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi.  
_

_**Chapter 9: Defending Her Honor**_

It was at the end of another longish meeting of the ANBU captains that Genta caught up with Hayate. His friend looked unusually unhappy--had been tense and impatient during the meeting. In fact, he'd been tense and impatient for several days. Which didn't make Genta feel exactly good about dumping this problem on Hayate now, but it needed to be dealt with, and Hayate was the one who needed to handle it. It was his team, after all.

"You got a minute, Hayate?" Genta asked, and he motioned for his friend to follow him. "I'll buy you a cup of coffee."

Hayate gave Genta a wary look and followed without comment.

"Man, you're really down in the dumps. Something wrong?" Genta asked.

"No. It's nothing. Just been busy," Hayate replied, but the glum look didn't leave him.

"Well I'm afraid I'm gonna make you busier," Genta said, and pushed open the doors to the cafeteria. He ordered a pair of hot coffees for them, and grabbed a couple of cookies, too.

"Cut the shit, Genta. What is it you're trying to butter me up for here?" Hayate asked, eyeing the pastries. "You want me to take on some horrible report you're supposed to write or something?"

"Nothing like that," Genta reassured, waving his hands dismissively. "I just have a little personnel issue I want to talk over with you. My guys were on the field with yours last week, sharing practice time. And when I left, they were in good shape, but when Daisuke came in, he was a bloody mess. He won't say a word about it, says it's personal. But he's been bitching and moaning about your team, so I figured maybe you knew what was up."

"I have no idea," Hayate said, and took one of the proffered cookies. "I'll ask Ryouma. If anyone in my team is likely to get pissy with that guy..." Actually if anyone was likely to take issue with Yonda Daisuke, it was probably Yuugao, but Hayate didn't think he really wanted to confront her about anything as touchy as that right now. It was as much as he could do to maintain a professional distance and not cross any more lines with her. Gods he was an idiot. Maybe he should tell Genta what had happened?

"Hayate?" Genta reached out and tapped Hayate's arm. "Earth to Hayate? You in there?"

"Yeah," Hayate said, standing. "I'll talk to the guys. Let you know what I find out."

Genta decided maybe he ought to do his own digging. But he'd give it a few days. Maybe Hayate had just eaten some bad fish.

* * *

Ryouma and Shou would have had to be deaf, blind, and probably dead not to have noticed the tension that had erupted in their team over the past three days. Hayate was unusually impatient and tetchy, though there could be any number of reasons for that. But Yuugao had missed an entire morning of training and showed up late that afternoon, looking so pale and sick that none of the men dared comment. Ryouma had guessed that it was her time of the month--and this was better than her biting their heads off, though a bit more worrying--but Shou pointed out that she'd never been like this before, and maybe she was coming down with the flu?

They spent the next day trying to verify their theory, and ended up discounting it. Yuugao was quiet and withdrawn, spoke only when spoken to, and never looked at Hayate at all; but she didn't faint, or throw up, or even so much as sneeze. When she asked Ryouma and Shou to continue her kenjutsu lessons, she said only, "I'm not ready to work with the taichou," and refused to speak any more of it. Ryouma began to concoct a grand theory based on her utter humiliation at Hayate's hands and her fragile pride being dashed to pieces. He wasn't yet sure if this was a good thing. If she got over it, it might help with some of her self-esteem issues; but at the moment, that seemed to be rather a large _if_.

So he was a little more than relieved when Hayate tracked the two of them down in the locker room after team training the next afternoon, after Yuugao had already vanished. Hayate still looked irritable, but at least he seemed ready to talk about it. "Yo," Ryouma greeted him, setting down the sandal with whose broken strap he'd been fidgeting while he and Shou discussed their latest theory. "You here to tell us what's happening to make you so pissy?"

Hayate gave Ryouma a cold look, and a slightly less chilly one to Shou, who was wisely keeping his mouth shut. "I've never had a discipline problem with you," he started. "And I don't like to think I do now."

Shou looked up sharply then. This was sounding more serious than he'd thought. "Hayate, there's nothing..."

"Be quiet and let me finish," Hayate said, and rubbed his head. It ached. Everything about the last several days gave him a headache, and avoiding Yuugao was not going to be a long term solution. Especially if Shou and Ryouma were picking up on it.

"Sakamoto Genta came to me yesterday after our meeting to ask about what the hell you did to his squad at the end of practice last week. I had to tell him I had no idea. So what the hell did you do? Is there some problem I need to know about?"

Ryouma had been _hoping_ for some dramatic confession of Secrets and possibly Espionage and all-around Cool Stuff. He hadn't figured Squad Three into his theories and couldn't see what they had to do with it. "We didn't do anything!" he protested, a little sullenly. Well, there was the old prank war with Aoki Kazuhiro and Shimizu Masao, but that had been strictly off-duty, and it had ended anyway after Fukashi died, months ago. "Anyway, they finished way before we did. That Yonda kid hung around for a while afterward, but Kazuhiro and Masao headed off." And they were the only reason he'd interact with Squad Three, anyway. Kazuhiro and Masao were good friends of his, but the rookie was an arrogant bastard, and Ryouma was cocky enough himself not to countenance it in others.

"Yeah," Shou said. "Daisuke was waiting around after we..." He stopped himself. He and Ryouma had left Yuugao alone on the field with Yonda Daisuke. The most arrogant, chauvinistic jerk in all of ANBU it seemed. And one who had some kind of grudge against their teammate.

"And?" Hayate asked, sounding like a parent waiting for a confession about a broken vase.

"And nothing," Shou said, glancing at Ryouma. He hoped his partner picked up on what he just had. "We finished training with Yuugao and we left. Nothing happened."

"Well, _we_ left," Ryouma said. He sounded like that kid confessing to, oh, maybe tossing a couple of shuriken in his bedroom, and maybe even letting his little brother cajole him into a game of Shuriken Tag, and maybe even passing by that table where the vase was--uh, had been... Not that he had any idea what was going on, but he was beginning to get a glimmer of one, and it looked bad. "Yuu-chan hung behind. Did she kill the guy? No, she'd've been detained by now, not just moping around trying not to cry. Unless she _thinks_ she killed him..." That was as good a theory as any, although Ryouma had rather liked the one where Yuugao fell madly in love with a traitor to Konoha and then had to kill him herself when she discovered his secret. "How long is he in hospital?"

"He's not," Hayate said, frowning. "But evidently you do know something about what went on." And it involved Yuugao. He cursed silently to himself. He should have seen it coming, really. Genta had complained more than once about Yonda's attitude, and Yuugao wasn't the sort to take an insult lying down.

An insult. Hayate's mind snapped back to the... sword lesson. The liberties he'd taken with her... that was a terrible insult. And of course she was unhappy. He wouldn't be surprised if she filed a formal complaint about him.

"Hayate?" It was Shou, sounding concerned.

Hayate blinked and looked up at him, trying to cover his unease.

"Are you alright, Hayate? You kind of spaced out there."

"It's just a headache," Hayate said, sounding grim.

"Huh," Ryouma said, thoughtfully. "I'd've thought Yonda'd be more of a pain in the ass." He held up a hand reflexively, as if to ward off his teammates' glares. "Honest, Hayate, we dunno anything else. Yuu-chan hung around behind; I figured she just went straight home, 'cause we didn't see her in the locker room." His dark eyes narrowed. Hayate's comments hadn't dissolved his theory; they'd only strengthened it. But if Yonda wasn't in hospital, and Yuugao was still upset...

_Someone_ needed to sort this out. And the boys who watched Yuugao's back on their missions might as well start doing it here, too. Ryouma threw Shou a significant glance. "We can sure find out."

Hayate gave them a pained look. "I came to talk to you to put an end to a discipline problem, not create one," he said warningly. He rubbed his head again and sighed. "We have to take missions with them, remember please. No matter how much or little you dislike..." He blinked, catching himself. "Like your comrades, they are your comrades."

Shou stood up and walked over to Hayate with a deep frown on his face. "You don't look well, Hayate," he said, completely ignoring Hayate's words. They might be comrades, but Daisuke was also a rookie and an arrogant prick. He needed to be taken down a notch or two, anyone could see that. Especially if he was tangling with Yuugao.

"I'm fine," Hayate insisted, as Shou put a hand to his forehead.

"You seem to be a little feverish," Shou said, and gave Ryouma a sign behind his back with his free hand. _Follow me,_ it said. "I think you should consider taking the rest of the afternoon off and getting some sleep."

In the field, that hand-sign generally meant that one's team was heading into dangerous territory, and that one misstep could get the whole team killed. Things were usually a bit clearer in the field. Ryouma might have no idea where he was supposed to follow now, but no one could accuse him of inability to improvise. (Often the improvisations ended up spectacularly bloody, but that was half the fun, wasn't it?)

"We'll remember and be good boys and all that jazz," he promised. "You can depend on us. Ending discipline problems is our _other_ specialty. Aside from killing people." In most cases, and possibly in this one, they might go together--but Ryouma was all innocence, and he _certainly_ wasn't thinking of how to put an end to a particular problem named Yonda Daisuke.

Even so, perhaps that wasn't the best way to put it. "Or," he added cheerfully, "we could just go talk to Yuu-chan. Offer her a shoulder to cry on, see what's up." He'd rather wade through a crocodile-infested swamp naked than provoke his quiet kunoichi teammate into crying on his shoulder, but maybe Hayate wouldn't realize that.

Hayate was about to reply when Shou interrupted. "Don't you think Hayate looks ill, Ryouma?" Trust the other man to run at the mouth. But confusing Hayate was probably just as good as benching him for what was obviously a tension headache. Probably caused by them, at this point.

"'m fine," Hayate protested. "And don't change the subject. If you're going to talk to Yuugao _or_ anyone on Squad Three, make sure you don't..."

"Hayate, we're not the idiots you seem to think," Shou cut him off. "But I'm going to send you down to talk to Nanao-sensei if you won't take my advice about getting some rest."

"You can't do that," Hayate grumbled. "I'm not unfit, I just have a headache and you are making it worse." He couldn't even remember what he'd been going to say, really. Don't make trouble for Genta. Don't make trouble for me. He was distracted and irritated, and it wasn't Shou or Ryouma's fault that he was in this mess, he reminded himself. He sighed and bit his lip.

"In that case," Ryouma said, dumping his gear back into his locker and springing to his feet, "we'll take ourselves off. Go to bed, Hayate. Somewhere that _isn't_ the couch in the office. You could even try someone else's bed; I've heard that does wonders for headaches..."

His babble didn't even have to make sense, at this point. The sooner Hayate got rid of them, the sooner he could get down to business. The sort of business that would, he hoped, end with Yonda Daisuke _hurting._

It was wanting to be in someone else's bed that was the whole problem, Hayate thought with chagrin. He waved a hand at his men dismissively. Maybe Shou was right. He hadn't exactly been sleeping well ever since... ever since he'd kissed Yuugao. He sighed heavily; just thinking about it made his temples throb.

"Go," Hayate said, and stepped towards the door himself. "Do whatever it is you're going to do, only don't let me find out about it. If you need me, I'll be at home."

Shou gave him a look, and Hayate added. "Sleeping, Sensei. I'll be at home sleeping."

"Good," Shou smiled. "I really didn't want to have to bust you to Nanao-sensei."

"I wouldn't've minded," Ryouma murmured, but he said it low enough that Hayate could pretend not to hear. He turned to Shou even before the door swung shut on their retreating captain's back, and his dark eyes lit with an unholy glee. "So," he said. "Sounds like we need to track down the little punk and have ourselves a talk."

And then... "Maybe," he added, much more reluctantly, "we should talk to Yuu-chan too."

"I say we talk to Squad Three's rookie first. And _if_ we need to after that, we can give Yuugao a heads up." Shou picked up a small senbon case from the top shelf of his locker. He showed it to Ryouma with a sly grin before tucking it into a pocket. "Think he'll know what these are?" he asked, and the smile grew a little more devious. They were, clearly, medical grade senbon. Taken from Shou's stash of medical equipment.

"I suppose we ought to try to find out what he actually did to her. If only so we can be very explicit about what he's never allowed to do ever again."

"You think he really did something?" Ryouma kicked his locker shut. "I mean, something we need to kill him for. If she roughed him up, she must've had a reason for it. S'not like she makes a habit of flipping out and killing people. Or beating them up, or whatever. Maybe she'd be a little less uptight if she did."

"If he raped her, we kill him," Shou said, as calmly as if he were confirming a plan to pick up some dango on the way to the next team meeting. "Or I guess, if he did something like that. Only I'd kind of assume if he did that, she'd have already killed him."

He carefully latched his locker and shrugged a faded blue hooded sweatshirt on over a black t-shirt.

"But anyway, he definitely needs to be taught not to mess with us or _our_ rookie."

Ryouma hadn't actually been thinking of anything that bad; he would cheerfully have slaughtered Yonda for much less. Or at least attempt it. He'd sort of half-promised Hayate they wouldn't kill Yonda (though really he'd only promised he'd be a good boy, and that was open to all sorts of interpretation). "Do we start out slow?" he asked, leading the way through the aisles of lockers and benches towards the door. "Ask him what happened? Or just pull him into an alley and beat him bloody? Bloodier?" What _had_ happened?

Curiosity had always been one of Ryouma's strongest traits, and although it had nearly got him killed more times than he could be bothered to remember, it had saved his neck--and his teams'--just as often. His teams' lives might not be at stake here, but Yuugao's happiness clearly was. And although Ryouma usually shirked responsibility whenever he could, this was one responsibility he wouldn't be turning down.

"We immobilize him," Shou said, following his taller comrade out. "Make sure he knows we mean business right from the start. And then we tell him we're sure he already knows why we're there, but maybe he'd like to explain to us what exactly made him think he could get away with whatever he did to Yuugao without having to face us afterwards."

Shou smiled, and it wasn't an entirely pleasant expression on his otherwise rather sweet-featured face. He wasn't exactly T&I material, but he _was_ an ANBU Hunter and a born genjutsu-specialist. He took a certain pleasure in the prospect of seeing Yonda Daisuke squirm.

"Between the two of us we can take him down easy, right? I'll make sure he doesn't sense us coming."

"Could take him down on my own," Ryouma muttered, glancing away from Shou's entirely-too-creepy smile. It was all too easy to forget, sometimes, that Shou was a genjutsu user as well as a medic and a worrywart. And it was, sometimes, a little disturbing to remember. Righteous vengeance was straight up Ryouma's alley, but he liked menacing a whole lot better than he liked creepy. "Except," he added, cheering up a little, "that'd probably involve melting him. And then we wouldn't get answers. So I guess you can help."

He shoved his hands onto the pockets of his black combats and took the stairs at a quick jog, heading for the lobby and its register. Two minutes' casual questioning established that Kazuhiro and Masao were still checked in and roaming somewhere around HQ, but Genta and Daisuke had both checked out. "Any idea when they'll be back?" Ryouma inquired. "Hayate's been making noises about inter-team training sessions--and, of course, _he_ can't be bothered to actually schedule it."

The kid at the desk grinned. "Well, Sakamoto-taichou didn't leave on his own, if you get my drift. So you might wanna wait on tracking him down."

"Shoot." Ryouma frowned at the register. "Could you at least let me know where I can find Daisuke? He's the ninjutsu user of the team--the guy I really wanna catch, anyway."

Thirty seconds later, he had Yonda Daisuke's home address scribbled on a scrap of paper, and a definite bounce to his step as he accompanied Shou out the front door. "See? I _can_ do subterfuge!"

"Yes," Shou agreed. "You can. It's always a shock when you show talent, but I suppose you'd be long dead if you didn't have something going for you besides your brawn." He turned down the street to the right as soon as they were out of the gate outside ANBU's compound. "So where are we going? I'm kind of interested to see what kind of place this guy lives in. He has enough attitude I'd guess it was gonna be near my family's place."

In the wealthy section.

Although money didn't necessarily make for arrogance, it certainly helped. And Daisuke had arrogance in spades.

"Thirty-seven Partridge Street, apartment 13," Ryouma announced, crumpling up the scrap of paper and shoving it into his pocket. "That's just a couple streets down from Hayate's, isn't it?" It was a middle-class residential district, filled mostly with unmarried ninja and a few young families. Shou's neighborhood wasn't much different, although Ryouma lived on the other side of town in a neighborhood generously described as just one step up from the slum. Shou might have come down in the world, but Ryouma'd made it at least two steps up.

They found Partridge Street, and the apartment building at number 37, without trouble. It was a five-story concrete complex, a little older than most of the surrounding buildings, but well-maintained. The stairwell was clean and brightly lit, the doors closed and the neighbors invisible. Apartment 13 had a scratchy mat outside the door. Ryouma eyed it with a scornfully curled lip and kicked the door.

There was no motion for a moment, then the door swung open to reveal Yonda Daisuke, dressed casually in jeans and a red shirt, and with his hair tousled and damp as if he'd just come from a shower. He certainly didn't look like he should've been hospitalized, except for a thin scab on his lower lip. His brow furrowed in confusion for a moment at seeing the two ANBU on his doorstep, but the puzzlement couldn't stop his grin. "Ryouma-senpai! Uh...Shou-senpai, right? C'mon in!" He stepped back, holding the door open, sweeping a hand out to indicate the living room. It looked like the typical bachelor pad, with a pair of socks rolled up and forgotten under the battered sofa, a jounin vest flung over the back of a chair, stacks of magazines slithering onto the floor under the coffee table. Ryouma glanced curiously at the top magazine in the pile. The busty blonde on the cover nearly obscured the title: _Lights Out_, one of the Fire Country's more notorious monthlies. He could probably get a month's worth of blushes out of Shou if he carried it off with them...

Daisuke was talking again. "The sofa kind of sinks in the middle, but it's comfortable. Can I get you anything? Beer? Shouchuu?"

"Beer's good," Ryouma said, a little off-balance. He hadn't expected... Well, he'd never actually _talked_ to the rookie much, outside that mission they'd run with Squad Three last month. But Masao and Kazuhiro's stories had certainly depicted him as an arrogant punk--_"Kinda like you,"_ Masao had said, _"but less amusing."_--and he'd been entirely prepared to enjoy punching the rookie's face in. That wasn't cockiness in the swift turn to the tiny kitchen and the cheerful grin as he handed out beers, though. He looked almost _nervous_ as he settled back into the armchair and popped the lid on his bottle. And his eyes, after that one blank moment trying to recall Shou's name, had settled back on Ryouma's face with a kind of anxiety to please that almost reminded him of Yuugao around the taichou. Before this week, at least.

Ryouma scowled down at his beer.

Shou took his beer with patrician grace, took a polite sip and settled back to observe his target. The obsequious little rat bastard. If he weren't so thoroughly convinced Yonda Daisuke was straight--and he'd certainly made enough of a show of talking about his oh-so-sexy girlfriend on that mission last month to convince anyone he was heterosexual--although perhaps that was a case of protesting too much? In any event, he certainly was acting like he had a crush on Ryouma. And wouldn't that go right to Ryouma's head? Although Shou was pretty sure he could tease Ryouma about his manly inamorata enough that he could knock him back down a peg when it became necessary. Still. Rookie hero worship, plain and simple.

Shou really, really disliked Daisuke, he decided. Especially how utterly clueless he was being. How could he sit there and chat up Ryouma about ninjutsu, knowing what he'd done to Yuugao? Whatever it was. It was clearly a sign the man had no remorse whatsoever. And being thoroughly convinced that Yonda Daisuke was guilty as charged, Shou took one more sip of beer and stood up.

"May I use your toilet?" he asked, ever so polite. And when Daisuke nodded and inclined his head and offered that it was "down the hall", Shou stepped behind his chair, pulled out a handful of slender, medical-grade senbon, and swiftly lodged them in Daisuke's neck.

The big man went limp at once, from the neck down, though his face registered outraged surprise.

Stepping back around to face him, Shou offered him a chilly smile. "No need to worry. I've paralyzed your voluntary muscles, but your autonomic nervous system should be intact. In fact, assuming I did that right--and I'm quite sure I did. You can ask Ryouma if you doubt my skills as a medic. Assuming I did that correctly, you should have full sensation of _pain_ as well."

Daisuke's eyes shot to Ryouma's face, and they weren't just outraged now. There was real betrayal there. Ryouma ruthlessly squashed down the beginnings of sympathy and leaned forward, baring his teeth in a smirk. "You ever really thought about the kind of guy who _volunteers_ to be the medic and genjutsu specialist for an assassination squad?" he inquired. "Shou knows what he's doing. He knows stuff I'm not sure _I_ want to know. And it sounds like you've heard plenty of Kazuhiro's stories about me. You really want to find out the sort of stuff that makes me look away?"

The rookie licked his lips. His voice was almost breathless. "I don't--what do you want?"

Ryouma shrugged. "It's pretty simple. You met up with our teammate Yuugao last week. What happened?"

"You're upset about _that_?" Daisuke demanded. Even with the little air his non-cooperative lungs allowed him, he managed to sound both incredulous and indignant.

"Wrong answer," Shou said, and grinned that terrible grin again. He didn't hide his motions this time as he opened the senbon case and carefully selected one--an aught-three gauge as thick around as a pencil and razor sharp. Rarely did he get to do this kind of work with such clear evidence that the target deserved it.

"Try again. Let's see if this helps." He dragged the needle's tip down Daisuke's sternum, plunging it into the solar plexus, and watched the rookie's eyes go white with pain.

Ryouma shifted, surged to his feet, and circled around the coffee table. He could see Daisuke's face from this angle, but Shou's back hid whatever the medic was doing. "We want the story," he said flatly, and then corrected himself: "The truth. Neither of you are in hospital. Your captain's complaining that we did something to your squad, and none of the rest of us know anything about it." At least, Kazuhiro and Masao didn't; they would have told Genta instantly if they'd had even an inkling of the truth. He wondered again, uneasily, if they should have asked Yuugao first... But confronting her about whatever had made her so miserable would be a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than _anything_ that could result from this.

"Let 'im breathe, Shou," he added. The rookie was gasping like a fish.

Shou withdrew the needle slowly, twisting it for maximum friction. A dark bloom of blood--deep red against the shirt's lighter hue--appeared on Daisuke's shirt around the hole the needle had pierced through the fabric. Shou flashed Daisuke another smile, and pressed a hand glowing blue-green with healing chakra against the wound, closing it almost instantly.

"Remembering the events of last week any more clearly yet, Rookie?"

Daisuke took the deepest breath he could manage, but it didn't seem to do much. He was still wide-eyed, wild-eyed. "_Nothing,_" he panted. "We--talked. Kenjutsu. She's not--good enough. Get you killed." His eyes caught on Ryouma's face, pleading--but it was belief he seemed to be asking for, not mercy. "_You_ know. Girls don't belong in ANBU."

They'd heard the story of Yuugao's reaction on the day of initiation, when she'd smashed this very man's instep for a comment much less cutting. Ryouma whistled silently. No wonder there'd been a confrontation. He knew Yuugao's fierce pride well enough by now to be certain that she must have demonstrated some tremendous self-control, if Daisuke had made it out without even a limp. The scabbing lip looked like it could be about four days old, though...

"I don't know, actually," he said coolly, shoving his hands in his pockets and leaning back against the television set. "She's got an outstanding mission record, and she broke my captain's shoulder. I liked her from the start. Shou used to think about the same as you do, though. You still agree with him, Shou?"

Shou took out one of his longest, slimmest needles and held it in the air, as if measuring its length. Then he stepped in and nudged Daisuke's knees apart with a kick, and gave him an appraising look. "I'd say," he said, and twirled the needle between thumb and fingers. "I'd say.." Shou's arm moved almost too quickly to be seen, the needle flashed silver in the air, sticking quivering straight up from the base of Daisuke's crotch. "She's got a lot more balls than you do. I can't imagine anyone I'd rather have at my back than Yuugao."

It was an exaggeration, perhaps, to say _can't_ but it wasn't far off the mark.

"She's certainly a woman, and she's certainly better than most of the ninja I know in ANBU."

Ouch. Ryouma had a very good idea where that senbon had just gone, and from the horrified pain distorting Daisuke's face, he was very glad he wasn't on the receiving end of Shou's anger. He'd been planning to get a few hits of his own in, but somehow that protective anger had drained away the longer he spent in Daisuke's living room. Even the rookie's unrepentant prejudice seemed more worthy of pity than blood, now--especially given that Shou seemed to have struck directly at the root of the problem. Ryouma caught himself hoping, for the rookie's sake, that the damage wasn't permanent. He didn't seem a bad guy. And idiocy wasn't a crime--out of uniform, at least.

"Guess you don't know," he said. "But then, you seem kinda mis-informed anyway. Yuugao's saved Shou's life once already, on a mission. She can beat me hand-to-hand two times out of three." Okay, that was something of an exaggeration--it was more like three times out of four, and only Ryouma's extra weight and experience could give him the win on that fourth time. "And even if she couldn't--she's our teammate now." He leaned forward, and the cool casualness fell away like a dropped henge. His voice rang like steel. "And when you mess with her, you mess with _us_."

Shou's expression was just as fierce for a moment, then he smiled, that same cool, calculated smile. "I can see by your eyes that we have reached an understanding," he said, and reached down to pluck the needle back out. He eased it out with a few gentle twitches. Just enough to send signals of distress racing through Daisuke's groin, to make his upper lip bead with sweat and his breath catch.

"Don't worry," he said, wiping the needle with a handkerchief and stowing it back in its case. "I'm sure there won't be any lasting damage. And a couple of weeks of rest from any activities that might strain the area..." Shou gestured at Daisuke's spread legs. "Shouldn't be a hardship. You're free to take missions."

"You're _crazy_," Daisuke breathed at last, when he could finally speak again. He was brave, at least; Ryouma had to give him that. He didn't know many men who'd still talk back to Shou after a demonstration like that. "You--the little bitch is the one who hit _me_. I didn't even touch her!"

"Keep it that way," Ryouma advised, "and we're on good terms. If you don't... Well." There was nothing even slightly friendly about his grin. "Shou's work may be a little more fine-tuned than mine, but mine's permanent."

Daisuke had seen the effects of Ryouma's work, on that collaborative mission. He licked his lips again. "She's your teammate," he said finally. "But if she endangers _my_ team on a mission--"

"Don't worry," Ryouma said flatly. "I don't think we'll be taking many missions together for a while. In fact, we'll have Hayate make sure of it."

Shou checked Daisuke's wounds carefully one more time. The solar plexus injury was nothing but a faint red spot. The place the needles had pierced his neck to paralyze him looked like minor bug bites. Or perhaps pimples. And the injury between the legs, he knew without having to look, was too tiny to be seen. Although Daisuke would undoubtedly be feeling the effects in the form of numbness and tingling and a certain... loss of function... for several days, if not weeks.

"Thank you for the beer," he said, picking up the bottle, still full, to take with him. "Don't get up." Daisuke couldn't have stood yet anyway. There was a good thirty minute getaway window for them if they needed it. "We'll see ourselves out."

He waited at the door for Ryouma to catch up before going through, and shutting it with a soft click behind them. They were out on the streets and a block away, before Shou said anything.

"Well, that was entertaining. But we still don't have a damn clue what's wrong with Yuugao."

"She was upset enough to deck the punk, but that's not nearly enough to make her brood like she's been doing," Ryouma agreed. "I mean...he criticized her kenjutsu? She _knows_ she's bad. That's why she's taking lessons. And she knows she's doing a damn fine job at everything else." He sighed roughly. "You think we need to talk to her?"

"Not really?" Shou said, sounding diffident. "I mean... Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a boyfriend or something. Something personal. Even if Daisuke had a hand in setting her off." Shou thought of his sisters and their moods. Intruding when one of them was depressed like Yuugao seemed to be was a sure fire way to end up catching all their vitriol. Yuugao could probably take them both down if she were sufficiently motivated to fight them. Or at least there would be a lot of injuries all around and some very messy inquiries that would make Hayate _extremely_ unhappy and... It just got worse from there. So if Yuugao reacted angrily to their meddling, that had an obvious bad outcome.

On the other hand, sometimes inquiring what was wrong with a dispirited sister made her cry. Shou didn't think he could handle it if they made Yuugao cry.

"Maybe we should just give her some time. It's only been a few days."

"She didn't seem to have a problem until after she fought with the taichou," Ryouma said thoughtfully. "Maybe we were right, after all. I mean, if Hayate slammed her down _after_ Daisuke told her she sucked... He can be a real bastard when he's trying to make a point, and she's been moody over smaller things than that. And if she, I dunno, broke up with her boyfriend on top of everything else... Hey, _is_ she dating anyone?" He was astonished to realize how much he didn't actually know about their newest teammate. They'd have to bug the desk clerk again to even find out where she lived.

"I have no idea," Shou answered, and took a sip of the beer Daisuke had been so kind to give them. He handed the bottle to Ryouma and pursed his lips thoughtfully. "If she did, it's not anyone in ANBU, or the rumor mill would have been all over it." His mind turned back to the question of Hayate. It was true, if Hayate was trying to get their attention, especially when he thought their weapons work, or really any aspect of their combat skills, was lacking, he could be a harsh taskmaster.

"You remember that time Hayate went after Fukashi? When he'd nearly flubbed that mission to Stone?" It had been ugly afterwards, watching their taichou beat Fukashi nearly into the ground in a spar. "I mean, Fukashi kind of earned that, since he was being arrogant and saying he didn't need excellent swordsmanship as long as he had his kusuri-gama. Hayate took him apart. You think that's what happened with Yuugao?"

"Can't see Yuu-chan mouthing off like Fukashi did, though." Far better to remember Fukashi's smart mouth and his lewd jokes than to dwell on his last moments. And Ryouma had been able to look at that charred mask on the wall of Hayate's office for months now without wanting to be sick or get drunk. That was another thing Yuugao had done for their team, another reason to look out for her. He scowled thoughtfully down at the dusty street, kicked aimlessly at a pebble, and shook his head at last. "She wouldn't talk back. You know how she is--if she thinks you're right, she'll take everything you throw at her without a word. And if she really messed up, even once..."

Well, Hayate'd been trained in the Gekkou style, where harsh criticism was a compliment, where a beat-down meant you had the potential to be worthy of your master's attention. Given how Yuugao had apparently responded to Daisuke's verbal attacks, though, she didn't see it that way. And while Hayate was usually pretty perceptive about his squad members' needs and abilities, if he'd slipped up with Yuugao, that would go a long way towards explaining her black mood this week.

"So," Ryouma wondered, "is it _Hayate_ we should be beating up after all?"

"I think," Shou said, with dawning realization, "he's already doing it for us." It explained so much. Hayate'd been in just as foul a mood--withdrawn and grouchy and just plain pissy--exactly as long as Yuugao had been off. "That's gotta be what happened. He gave her a good old-fashioned Gekkou Hayate-taichou style schooling, and she probably... Oh man. Do you think he made her cry? Even if she only kind of lost it for a second, she'd probably half-consider seppuku as the only reasonable way to save face. And Hayate'd feel like a complete bastard, which would explain why he's been impossible to live with since then, too."

He was sure of it. It made _sense_, and it was a founding principle you learned in medicine--when you hear hoofbeats, think horse, not zebra. The simplest explanation was usually the best one.

"I seriously hope they get over it soon. The next mission is going to be a real pain in the tail if they're both still sulking."

"We could try telling 'em to just get over themselves," Ryouma suggested, but he rejected the idea a second later with a shake of his head. "Getting them to hate _us_ instead of each other--or themselves--isn't gonna help much."

"I don't think they hate each other. More like she's embarrassed and he realizes he screwed up." Shou put a hand out for the bottle. "If you're not gonna drink the beer, then give it back." He stretched as he walked, easily matching Ryouma's strides. "I can't believe you were so stressed about the whole thing you actually forgot to drink even with a cold bottle in your hand." He laughed and swiped the bottle away, taking a large swallow. "You really like our little Rookie-chan, don't you?"

"She's our teammate," Ryouma snapped, glowering down at his other teammate. But he knew what Shou had been implying--or, more to the point, what he hadn't been implying--and the stiffness slowly relaxed out of his shoulders. "And she's a good kid," he said, lamely. "She..."

It was something to do with Fukashi, and the way Ryouma's life wasn't quite so empty anymore with a fourth mask running beside him and a quiet, confident voice acknowledging Hayate's orders. Something to do with the way she'd teased him back when they first met, as though she had plenty of experience with older brothers--although one of the few facts he _did_ know about her was that she had no family left. And somehow, that was enough for him to slip into the role he'd begun to play, to see her as a little sister as well as a teammate: someone to tease, and someone to protect.

And it looked like the only way he could protect her now, with the damage already done, was to _make_ her good enough to throw the lie in Daisuke's teeth, and to make Hayate proud.

"C'mon," he said, quickening his pace. "There's still an hour or two of light left. Plenty of time to get her training again."

ooo ooo ooo

_End Chapter Nine_

_A cast list, for those struggling with the large numbers of characters we've introduced, can be found at:_

_moonlit-anbu . livejournal . com / 2063 . html _


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